If you’ve got a piggy bank, kiss it goodbye. If you don’t, I guess stare deeply and lovingly into the imagined eyes of the Apple wallet icon on your phone or something. It’s summer in the US, which means It Is Time: The Steam Summer Sale is here.
This year’s sale is called the Summer Picnic Sale. (Yes, it’s winter in Australia, but Valve doesn’t localise the name of its sales.) It lasts until July 4. Sticking with recent Steam Sale trends, there are no daily deals or flash sales. There also doesn’t appear to be a game or ARG associated with the sale. Bummer. You can, however, unlock trading cards by using your discovery queue.
There are some solid (though not amazing) deals. As far as more recent games go, I recommend taking advantage of deals on Darkest Dungeon, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Stellaris, The Solus Project, Doom, The Witcher 3 and Banished.
Now, if you’re looking for crazy cheap games, here are a few:
- Undertale for $US6.99 ($9)
- English Country Tune for $US0.49 ($1)
- Space Engineers for $US7.49 ($10)
- Hand of Fate for $US7.49 ($10)
- Outlast for $US4.99 ($7)
- The Witcher 2 for $US2.99 ($4)
- Tales from The Borderlands for $US8.49 ($11)
Oh, and in case you were wondering, the award for this year’s best meme kick-off video goes to ClintBeastwood (Warning: slight Game of Thrones season two spoilers):
A slight word of caution: Steam’s being hit by absurd traffic right now, and it doesn’t seem like Valve was super prepared (which is weird, because they do this every year). It’s been up and down all morning. Hopefully it will resume consistent service soon.
Comments
36 responses to “This Year’s Steam Summer Sale Has Started”
DOOM base price went back up to $79.99USD for aussies…………
Was only reduced for a few days. Absolutely ridiculous. Would recommend anyone just buy a cd key.
Ironically it’s $47 at EB at the moment. @andy
Bethesda doesnt understand that uploading a price spreadsheet into stram doesnt work… cause the prices in Australia are USD.
Just pick it up from G2A.
Otherwise ozgameshop keys are generally pretty reasonable.
Steam seems to be struggling with all the activity this morning.
Doom is $47AUD at EB Games. Sorry Steam, you’re still not getting any of my money this year.
I never thought I’d see the day that EB Games have something cheaper than anywhere else. In fact it’s cheaper than any CD key online last I checked.
On other news, I just saw a pig fly past my window.
I bought Skyrim Legendary from EB games a couple of weeks ago for $20… Steam has it for $36.50 USD… The base version of the game is over $20 AUD on Steam… I hate the double price gouging on Steam from USD and artificially inflated prices.
Steam sucks in that respect. Unless something is on sale at a good discount (and even then you can find keys cheaper on other sites) they’re a bigger rip off than EB. At least EB can sort of justify it via the cost of shipping to Australia and having to pay for rent and staff.
It’s been made worse in the last few years with publishers setting the inflated prices and still charging us in USD… It made sense when the AUD was strong, but now we’re hit with a double price hike in the publishers favour… I simply haven’t purchased anything directly from Steam unless it’s been $5 as at that price you simply cannot find it anywhere cheaper.
Literally all but of of the games on my wish list are on sale.
This could be dangerous.
You need to cut back on those energy drinks
If they’re going to have any chance at playing all those games, I reckon they’ll have to step up the energy drinks!
Chalk it up to an early morning haha.
I actually stopped drinking energy drinks earlier in the year. I was drinking them too much at work and getting headaches on weekends when I wasn’t.
I miss the old Steam sales :(. The ones with daily specials, flash sales, interactive games and competitions. This new ‘all-the-deals-all-the-time’ format just isn’t as exciting anymore.
There’s pros and cons. At least this way you don’t buy a gift for a friend at 33% off only to wait a day and find out that it’s now 66% off. That was fucked. (Less so with the refund system now.)
What that effectively meant was that no games were worth buying until the final day, which always listed all the games at their lowest price from throughout the sale.
It’s less exciting this way, but it’s more fair.
Yeah as much as I prefer the consistent pricing over the likes of flash sales, I do miss the little seasonal achievement hunts for freebies or special TF2 items
Meh, I’m over Steam. The sales just bring prices down to closer to what they should be for us, make that currency conversion hurt a little less.
Start trading in AUD and then I might bother to buy games from Steam again rather than finding better prices elsewhere.
At the moment the real value in this is all those indie titles that I don’t particularly feel like trying out for experimentation at $15-20, discounted down to five. Screw trying to hunt around and find a better price than that, elsewhere. I’d be shaving a buck off it at best.
That kind of CD key hunting is best done with the bigger AAA/freshly-launched titles (which very rarely get any kind of discount in the closest Steam sale to their release, anyway).
Just bought Alien Isolation and expansion for $13 USD and the Witcher 3 and expansions. bought witcher when it first came out on the ps4 cause my pc lacked the balls to run it. Found it such a good game that I knew I’d still be playing it long after the death of this gens consoles. Now it’s all pc gaming.
How much were the Witcher expansions?
10% off each or 33% off the Witcher + expansion pass bundle
I just bought:
BioShock Infinite Season Pass
AC Revelations DLC
The Stanley Parable
Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs
Max Payne 3
Metro: Last Light Redux
Total cost was around $50 AUD! Pity a lot of the stuff on my wishlist is only 20-50% off though
I’ve been wish-listing stuff throughout the year and am finding that the wishlist is the best way to figure out which sales are actually worth it.
I can jump to the wishlist page and do a scan of the discount amounts or simply do a text search for the discount percent and bounce between the deepest of discounts.
Since when do games have a “Shared/split screen” tag? It’s amazing, I no longer have to read the fine print to work out if a game has couch co-op!
Still read the fine print… the tags are voluntarily added by the publisher and only changes occasionally when enough steam users spam a tag into popularity.
Also dont think the tags are legally binding
Dark Souls 2’s DLC tags were, last time I checked, ‘Walking simulator’ and ‘casual’.
We’d certainly be covered by Australian law if it came to it, but I’m pretty sure Valve’s refund system is good enough now to handle it though.
And yeah, I’ll still be reading the fine print to find out the nature of it, but at least now it’s a matter of “what kind of couch co-op”, not “is this couch co-op, lan or online?”
OK what are some nice looking games I can stress test my upgraded PC on?
My specs:
GTX TURBO 970
i7 6700 (not the K)
8GB DDR4 RAM
Currently eyeing off Rise of the Tomb Raider, for example. GTAV perhaps?
With those specs… pretty much anything? Try grabbing Skyrim/FO4 and ramping up the mods. Even the beefiest PCs can start to buckle under the strain of 4k resolution packs, advanced shaders, and draw-distance mods.
Dark Souls 3 at 60fps with ultra PC settings fairly made my jaw drop. Same for XCOM2, if you can manage it (its poorly-optimized, though, so you really require uber specs to get just ‘very nice’ graphics). The Division is fairly damn pretty on ultra. So much detail…
Games like the Division, for example – I’m hoping more for optimisation in such a game (right?) over pretty textures.
I’ve had very positive experiences with Witcher 3 (GOG version), but as I’m actually engaging with that I’m finding I’m tweaking for the best experience, not to show it off.
Skyrim I haven’t really tried yet, I put 100 hours into it but hardly touched it since the upgrade. The mods fill me with dread, I may wait for the free upgrade that’s coming.
I got Arkham Knight, and while shortly after my rebuild it ran like a dream (I thought I dodged all its errors) it’s now a bit of a mess. I’m messing around with the dark arts in the options but I’m a bit sour on it now. Shame, it really popped for a good while there.
Elite Dangerous: Horizons expansion at US$20.09 might finally be worth buying… maybe.
Bought Crypt of the Necrodancer, Zoombinis, and Offworld Trading Company.
Mainly waiting on a good price for a flight sim.
EB have doom for $47 at the moment, probably won’t last much longer. Steam won’t be cheaper than that.
https://ebgames.com.au/pc-201663-DOOM-UAC-Pack-PC
I think I prefer GoG’s Summer Sale now.