The 2015 Steam Winter Sale begins today at 10 a.m. PST/ 1 p.m. EST. The sale’s launch was leaked last week, along with details of how the event will be run. Much like the Steam Autumn sale, the Winter Sale will not feature the old revolving door of flash sales and daily deals. Instead, each game will get a fixed price cut that runs the duration of the of the event, with Valve curating the sale by featuring different discounts on the store’s front page.
This more curated approach means you don’t have to be obsessively checking your PC or phone to see if the price of a game you want has dropped to the lowest it can be. But, this does mean it may be more difficult to see which games are on sale, since Valve is only updating the main page once per day.
Here’s Valve’s statements on changes to the events structure, which come from the Steamworks developer group prior to the autumn sale.
In past sale events, we’ve asked for two discounts—a duration discount that runs for the length of the sale, and a feature discount that runs in the event that a game is featured on the front page. This year, to optimize the sale for customers and to allow us to feature and recommend your products in more ways to more customers, we’re asking for just one discount, to run the length of the sale
As spotted by Shacknews, there’s an interesting and helpful tool you can use to find and filter which games are on sale for how much. It’s called the Steam Database Sales Tracker, and allows you to see which games have the biggest discounts, and lets you group all discounted games together for easier navigating.
Happy bargain hunting, and keep an eye on Gameranx for some of the sale’s best deals.
