Ooooo, are you ready? 10am PST, December 21, 2023 the online store – Welcome to Steam (steampowered.com) – opens for one of the two biggest online sales of the year.
Time to check your Steam wishlist, everybody. See what’s on sale, how deep, and decide whether or not you want to buy. Hopefully, you’ve been saving some quarters!
Every year, Steam has two major sales — they have a bunch of sales throughout the year, in fact — offering thousands of games, including some very deep discounts: in the Summer and Winter. Today, Thursday December 21, 2023 at 10am PST (GMT-8), it’s time for the latter sale, that runs until after the first of the new year.
Throughout the year, whenever I check out games friends are playing on the most useful page on Steam, friends activity page, I’ll add games to my wishlist. Then, when these two major sales happen, or really, any other sales throughout the year, will check and see the discount %. If the sale price is close to the best, it might be time to add to the shopping cart.
If you’re not using the free SteamDB.info browser extension, this will help you determine how good the sale is on any game, what the lowest price ever was, so you can know at a glance how good is the current sale price historically.
Take, for example, the lowest price ever for Sega CD Night Trap 25th Anniversary Edition on Steam, a game I’ve had on my wishlist for some time, waiting for it to go on sale again. Here is what that SteamDB.info plugin looks like on the sales page:
Regular price of $14.99, but shows as low as $2.99 (80% off back in June 2020).
Speaking of Steam shopping, the new beta client of Steam, for those using, is adding some useful features:
The big addition is “inline gifting,” meaning you can purchase gifts for multiple friends without having to make multiple purchases. When you add a game to your cart, you’ll be presented with a dropdown menu enabling you to purchase it for yourself (and mark it private if you like) or as a gift, at which point you’ll be able to continue shopping for more games. When you check out, you’ll then have the option to select who each gift game is for.
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Another feature added is the new “privacy” feature Steam users can add for any game, so that it will not appear to friends and others. Not sure if I’ll ever use this one, but definitely will be using and enjoying the gifting feature when that’s pushed out from beta to the official Steam client. It’s been a real hassle gifting games one a time. I’m curious if we’ll be able to also gift multiple copies of one game to multiple friends? Will find out, I guess.
In the meantime, the sales is on, if it’s between the dates you’re reading this in December 2023 and early 2024. Plenty of time to go through the games you’re interested in playing in 2024.
Share your favorite deals during the Steam Winter 2023 sale in the comments. Am always on the lookout for great deals on games. Happy game shopping to you!
UPDATE 12/21/2023 @10:04am PST: if this is like prior years sales, the sales tend to show up in batches, based on past experience, so do not expect every deal to appear instantly at launch. You’ll want to check back on your wishlists, friendly reader gamers.