It’s the most wonderful and most costly time of the year: the 12th annual Steam Winter Sale is now on. Valve is suggesting that over 15,000 games will be on sale during this time period, which isn’t surprising considering how many games are on Steam these days. The sale runs for two weeks from today, December 20, to January 3.
One of the major items on sale is Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series, which has up to 67 percent off all titles in the series. That doesn’t sound that much, but it includes this year’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which is 50 percent off at a pretty ridiculous $29.99 / £24.99. Check out the Steam store page for every other discount. The theme of the Steam Winter Sale 2018 is the “Extremely Cozy Cottage of Surprises,” which is an advent calendar with doors that can be clicked on every day to get prizes. These include emotes, backgrounds, trading cards, and extra offers.
The Steam Winter Sale also coincides with the Steam Game Awards, which can be voted on now. These awards include game of the year, VR game of the year, best developer (nope, doesn’t include Valve), and the weirder ones like “most fun with a machine.” Voting on these categories gets you special trading cards. The Steam Game of the Year nominees include PUBG, Monster Hunter World, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and Hitman 2. The winning games will be announced in February, which seems rather late to us.
The sale comes at the end of a tumultuous year for Valve and Steam, which saw major competitor the Epic Games Store launch and immediately begin tempting away former Steam titles. The latest entries in series that were formerly exclusive to Steam, such as Call of Duty and Fallout, launched instead on other digital platforms. As Valve heads into 2019, the company better have a plan other than sales to redeem confidence in Steam.
