Image: Valve

It's finally here - our first big Steam sale! Not quite as massive as the Summer or Winter ones, of course, but there's still tons of great games going for very cheap this next week, and we're here to help you find some great deals that go beyond Steam's top fifty bestsellers list. Not only that, but we're here to help you save money in general, with a guide on navigating sales in general.

If you already think you know all the tricks to shave down the prices during sales season, skip down to our recommendations index below, but if you think you might need a refresher (or a crash course, if you're new to PC gaming), let's get cracking!

How to get the best deals in Steam sales and beyond

While that initial hardware cost might sting a bit (depending on how Gamer Spec you want your machine), one of the best parts of gaming on PC is that the software can be very cheap, especially with a little help from us! £70 may be the standard RRP for a new game, but there’s seldom a reason to pay more than £45 on PC, even at launch!

While it might be tempting to just pick up stuff the moment you get a notification email from Steam that it’s discounted, you can save a lot of money by following these handy tips:

Maintain a large wishlist

Even if your brain-goblins tell you to keep clutter to a minimum, it’s often a useful idea to add every game that even vaguely interests you to your Steam wishlist, and we'd recommend starting over on our monthly playlist page. Not only will this get you notifications when it does get discounted, but the Steam Wishlist page can be filtered by items on sale, genre, how big the discounts are and more. But the other reason is…

Let other sites do the legwork for you

There are several bargain-tracking sites out there, but our go-to is IsThereAnyDeal, which tracks prices across a raft of sites, including telling you if a game is unusually cheap now, or has been cheaper previously. You can often get significant savings over Steam, and there are no sketchy key resellers listed - it’s all vetted retail outlets. Just double-check that it’s a Steam key you’re buying, unless you’re cool with GOG or Epic. Once you’ve made an account on IsThereAnyDeal, you can have it tap into your Steam Wishlist and inform you of deals across all of those sites.

Filter, sort and sieve for those golden deals

Beyond IsThereAnyDeal, I also find SteamDB's search features to be vastly better than Steam's native tools. Want to search for high-rated RPGs but filter out MMOs, roguelikes and survival sandboxes? Dead easy. Want it to only show you games which are the most discounted they've been? One click. Only stuff with under 100 user reviews, looking for the next hidden gem? No problem. Plus, you can also hook SteamDB up to your wishlist to help you navigate that, or filter out stiff you're already looking at.

Bundles, Humble & Otherwise

It’s always worth a quick poke around bundle-heavy storefronts such as Fanatical, Humble, Green Man Gaming and Digiphile. Better yet, IsThereAnyDeal tracks most of them for you. Each has its own system, but almost all offer big packs of games on Steam. The discounts are often so steep that it might be cheaper to snag one game you really wanted along with several others - might help broaden your gaming horizons, too. It’s also worth noting that the Humble Choice (IGN's subscription bundle service) also builds up a major discount on the store - up to 20% after a year. This stacks on top of the store’s regular discounts, so you can often get 30% or more off a brand new AAA game before it even launches.

Free stuff’s cool

A surprising number of great games get given away for free, especially over at the Epic Games Store, which often doles out two titles each week, and one a day running through their end-of-year celebrations. Once again, IsThereAnyDeal tracks everything available, and it seldom hurts to spend a minute or two a week just adding freebies to your account. They’ve given away some really big stuff, too, including Death Stranding: Director’s Cut, A Plague Tale: Innocence and the entire Batman Arkham Trilogy. Steam gets the occasional giveaway too, but less frequently.

Organize your library

Lastly, not quite a sales tip, but if you shop around and snag freebies, you’ll build up an assortment of games across Steam, GOG, Epic, Itch and more, and it can be tricky keeping track of it all. As a Windows user, I highly recommend Playnite, which is a free, open-source app that tracks your games across multiple storefronts and can install and launch them without requiring any extra legwork from you. Similar to what GOG Galaxy promises, but never quite delivers. While a Linux version of Playnite is planned, the Heroic Games Launcher fills that void for the penguin crowd.

And that, there, is a crash course on saving big bucks when shopping for PC games. And now for the part where we completely obliterate your wallet and grow your Steam backlog to utterly unreasonable scale. Also known as the fun part.

Recommendations & top sales picks

Every day, we've got another lineup of sales picks, so make sure to come back and see what we've been up to. We're starting off with a nice general grab-bag, but expect things to get weirder as we dig deeper into our bag of tricks. Let's get rolling:

Day 1: Steam Playlist Picks - Big discounts on five of 2026's best

Day 2: [TO BE UNLOCKED]

Day 3: [TO BE UNLOCKED]

Day 4: [TO BE UNLOCKED]

Day 5: [TO BE UNLOCKED]

Day 6: [TO BE UNLOCKED]

Day 7: [TO BE UNLOCKED]

Day 8: [TO BE UNLOCKED]

And with just one piece, that's it for now, but we'll be back tomorrow and every day of the sale with a fresh round of deals. Trust in the Steam Hype system!