Skip to main content

Ready your credit cards: The Steam Summer Sale has arrived

It’s that time of year again. Just when you thought you could save some money for the holiday game rush, the Steam Summer Sale kicks off and threatens your wallet with tempting deals. The annual summer bonanza is live right now and filled with deals that might encourage you to stay inside throughout the early days of the season — or much longer if you let your purchases get out of hand (we don’t judge).

Don’t be discouraged if you can’t access the storefront right away. As these things go, the site is very shaky due to the swarms of eager PC gamers scouring for deals. This seems to happen at the start of every Steam sale. The site should stabilize after the initial flood of people checks out the offerings. If you do successfully land on the page, expect loading to move at a crawl.

Recommended Videos

And don’t worry if you have trouble getting on Steam at the start of the sale. If you’re unfamiliar with how recent Steam sales have operated, all deals run for the duration of the sale. In the previous sale model, Steam had daily deals that you had to jump on fast, which added a bit of guesswork to buying games throughout the sale.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

Steam will, however, highlight certain games each day, so you still may want to check back to make sure you didn’t miss anything the first time around. This year’s summer sale runs until July 5, giving you about two weeks to settle on your haul.

While there are surely hundreds of games with enticing price tags, here are some that saw and recommend:

  • Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom – $36 (40 percent off)
  • PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds – $20 (33 percent off)
  • Halo Wars: Definitive Edition – $10 (50 percent off)
  • Stardew Valley – $12 (20 percent off)
  • Hollow Knight – $10 (34 percent off)
  • Into the Breach – $12 (20 percent off)
  • Fallout 4: Game of the Year Edition – $30 (50 percent off)
  • Fallout 3 or Fallout: New Vegas – $3.30 (67 percent off)
  • Sid Meier’s Civilization VI – $24 (60 percent off)
  • Hyper Light Drifter – $8 (60 percent off)

Beyond games, you can also grab a Steam Link for the ridiculously low price of $2.50. That is 95 percent off. The Steam Controller is also on sale for $33.50, along with various bundles that include a game. Make sure to check out the list before purchasing a game and controller separately.

Steven Petite
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Steven is a writer from Northeast Ohio currently based in Louisiana. He writes about video games and books, and consumes…
You can prepare for Dragon Age: The Veilguard for $4 during PlayStation’s Summer Sale
A dragon appears on the ground in Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard from BioWare and EA is one of the biggest games set to launch this fall. It will mark the first new game in the fantasy RPG series in a decade and hopefully be a single-player return to form for BioWare after the ill-regarded Anthem. If you're planning to play Dragon Age: The Veilguard when it launches later this year, you should catch up on the series' lore by revisiting some of the older games in it. Thankfully, the PlayStation Store Summer Sale just gave you the perfect opportunity to get Dragon Age: Inquisition for quite a low price.

For the rest of July, Dragon Age: Inquisition -- Game of the Year Edition, which includes the 50+ hour-long RPG and all of its DLC, is discounted to just $4 on the PlayStation Store as part of this Summer Sale. That's a 90% discount from its typical $40 price tag. If you've been wondering what to pick up as part of PlayStation's big summer sale and plan on playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard later this year, then getting Dragon Age: Inquisition and all its DLC for just $4 is clearly the deal to go with.

Read more
My Steam library (probably) looks better than yours
A Steam library filled with custom artwork.

I don't mean to brag, but my Steam library is looking pretty good these days. No, it's not the number of games I own, my Steam level showing how much money I've throw into the digital void, or a string of Counter-Strike 2 skins that I hold like securities. My Steam library looks good because I spent just a little bit of time tweaking the artwork for games that I have installed.

You might already know that Steam allows you to set custom artwork for your games. Hover over any game in your library, right-click, and follow Manage > Set custom artwork to apply just about anything to the grid, hero, and icon images of your Steam library. Even with a few dozen games -- most PC gamers I know have a library in the hundreds -- it could take you hours doing this for every game in your library as you hunt down artwork, organize it on your PC, and set it within Steam.

Read more
Get one of the best games of the last decade for $2 in Steam’s Summer Sale
Key art for Celeste.

During every Steam Summer Sale, tons of great indie games get massive discounts. For just a couple of dollars, you can pick up some of the best games the video game industry offers. Looking at the Featured Deep Discounts for this year's Steam Summer Sale, one indie game that stands out from the rest of the bunch is Celeste.

Released by Maddy Makes Games in 2018, Celeste is one of the best indie games of the 2010s; it even earned a rare five-star rating from Digital Trends when it launched. I had the pleasure of playing this game ahead of its wide release then, and I was completely taken aback by how it cleverly reinforces its poignant narrative themes through gameplay, which tasks players with mastering the controls and learning the layout of platforming challenges bit by bit to overcome a massive obstacle. If you haven't checked out Celeste yet, it's a steal at just $2, a 90% discount from its typical $20 price tag.

Read more