When you think Steam Summer Sale, you probably think virtual cards. You may also think about calling your bank manager for a loan extension, but your financial affairs are your own business, I won’t judge.
Late last week, a somewhat credible post from the Russian social network site VK put the summer Steam sale date at 11 June. The same post suggested the event would run to 20 June, at which point the traditional Encore sales would begin and last until 22 June.
Today, items titled “Mysterious Card” have been showing up in Steam user’s inventories. You can see a few of them for sale in the Steam marketplace over in this direction.
The very same thing happened last year, on (funnily enough) 11 June, and heralded the arrival of the Steam Summer Sale on 19 June.
Further indications that these cards are, indeed, related to an upcoming sale are suggested by SteamDB, who’ve done some digging into the app itself.
The mysterious card's app has a "Summer Sale 2015" depot, wonder what that could be for? pic.twitter.com/gIS3JCY5AZ
— Steam Database (@SteamDB) June 2, 2015
Pretty conclusive stuff, unless Valve are stringing us all along for some reason. So, while the 11 June date is not yet confirmed, it does seem clear that the annual Steam sales event is on its way fairly shortly. At the very least you can expect some special cards to be involved, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were also some sort of meta-game that doubles as a devious social experiment.