The leaked and anticipated Steam Summer Sale kicked off today, offering discounts on a wide number of titles. It will be running for the next two weeks.
The sale is one of the two big discount events of the year, and it always brings in a huge flood of customers. As such, you may have problems accessing Steam pages or using the payment system. If this happens, just wait a bit until things ease up. There is plenty of time until the sale ends to find the bargains you are looking for.
All the details of what’s on sale can be found on the Steam specials page, but we’ll have updated details on what’s hot right here.
The Steam servers seem to be coming back up after the initial flood of hits, and here are some notable deals:
- Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey -50%
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider -60%
- Football Manager 2019 -66%
- Valkyria Chronicles 4 -66%
- Nioh: Complete Edition -60%
- Celeste -40%
- Frozen Synapse 2 -40%
Summer sale throwdown
This year’s Summer Sale has drawn more hype than usual because of the heated competition between Steam platform owner Valve and the market newcomer, the Epic Games Store. Epic ran their Epic Mega Sale back in May with across the board discounts of at least $10 on games over $15. That ran into a few controversies, as if Epic needed more of those, but don’t seem to have stopped developers from signing on to their store as E3 saw more developers announce exclusivity agreements.
Valve is using their enormous catalog, user reach, and deep pockets to fight back against Epic’s recent spree of paid exclusivity agreements that have called Valve’s market leader position into question for the first time in ages.
Steam Grand Prix
Valve has often gamified the Summer Sale with browser game, card collection, and XP mechanics, and this year they’ve created a browser game called Steam Grand Prix. Players choose to join team Pig, Hare, Tortoise, Cockatiel, or Corgi, earn points by doing quests, and then spend those points on boosts to help their team win. If your team wins you have a chance to win games off of your wishlist. Winning teams are determined at 10 AM Pacific every day.
When you boost in Steam Grand Prix you also earn tokens that can be saved up to get a discount on a specific game you want to buy. Unfortunately, you need to earn a sizable 15000 tokens to get this discount. Quests that get you the points you need to boost are earned by getting in-game achievements, so if you have some time to play neglected games in your catalog it may prove to be worth your time.
