Steam’s 2021 Autumn Sale is Now Live

The year is winding down, the leaves are changing colors, and as if on cue, Valve has launched its annual Steam Autumn Sale. This week-long event serves to give legions of PC gamers here in the U.S. an excuse to both spend copious amounts of money on discounted video games and (in doing so) give themselves a method whereby they can avoid any lingering family members after Thanksgiving festivities. It would seem some degree of normalcy is beginning to return to the PC gaming world, at least so long as Valve has a say in the matter.

In any case, I’ve got a couple of rapid-fire game recommendations I intend to dish out within this article, but first I have to make a quick correction to the record. You see, a while back, the Steam sale-predicting wizards over at Steam Database issued a prediction which dictated that this year’s Steam Autumn Sale would last from yesterday, November 24th, through Tuesday, November 30th. If you’re a recurring reader of ours, you might recall that Valve even publicly confirmed the accuracy of the dates present in that leak a while later.

It seems that either there was a miscommunication of some description or Valve arbitrarily decided to extend the duration of the sale by a day. That is to say, according to the home page of the Steam Store, this sale will actually conclude at 10 AM Pacific Time on Wednesday, December 1st. If nothing else, this gives those of us who may not have an upcoming payday before the turn of the month a chance to get some shopping done. I am quite grateful for that.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention that while the Autumn Sale is live, Steam users can participate in 2021’s Steam Awards by voting for their favorite games in each category. This year’s accolades up for grabs will more than likely seem familiar to those who voted in last year’s awards ceremony. Allow me to elaborate in case you’re interested in this sort of thing.

The categories chosen for the current Steam Awards are as follows: the obligatory Game of the Year Award, the VR Game of the Year Award, the Labor of Love Award, the Better with Friends Award, the Outstanding Visual Style Award, the Most Innovative Gameplay Award, the Best Game You Suck At Award, the Best Soundtrack Award, the Outstanding Story-Rich Game Award, and finally, the Sit Back and Relax Award. All of that is to say, Valve hasn’t changed a thing in terms of the available accolades from those selected last year.

For each of the categories I just listed off except the Labor of Love Award, participants must nominate a game that was released this year. The Labor of Love Award is intended for titles released before 2021 whose developers are still regularly adding new content to their released games. If you’re interested, I reported upon the list of games that took home the virtual gold in 2020’s Steam Awards shortly after the victors were made public.

Let’s move on to those game recommendations I said I had for you a moment ago. First up, to the surprise of absolutely no one by this point, we have a version of Sid Meier’s Civilization VI. Yes indeed, I’m recommending Civ 6 during a prominent Steam sale, and thus, the world may continue to turn. This time around, I present the Civilization VI Anthology Bundle.

This is a positively massive amount of content for Civ VI. It gets you the base game, all its Digital Deluxe Edition DLC, both of its full expansions, and all six parts of its season pass known as the New Frontier Pass. You get all of that for a cool $35.08 USD, assuming you don’t already own any parts of the bundle.

My second and final recommendation for this year’s Steam Autumn Sale is Back 4 Blood. Something tells me you’ll be seeing me discuss this title in at least one or two more articles before the end of the year if you catch my drift. All three currently-available editions of Back 4 Blood are discounted by 30%. Personally, I find this to be a noteworthy discount considering the game’s prominence and how recently it was released.

This brings the price of the base game down to $41.99 USD, while the Deluxe and Ultimate editions are $62.99 and $69.99 USD, respectively. Granted, given the fact that the game is so new that none of its planned DLC is actually out yet, you may want to hold off on getting either of the latter two editions or the annual pass for now. Unless you’ve got your heart set on getting absolutely everything Back 4 Blood has to offer over time during this particular sale, you might be better off just purchasing the base game and determining your opinion of it before going that route.

There you have it, folks! I know just two game recommendations seems paltry for an article like this by my standards but fret not: I’ll have a significantly longer article full of my personal suggestions ready for you sometime next month during the Steam Winter Sale. Until then, do feel free to let your fellow readers and I know what (if anything) you intend to purchase during the Steam Autumn Sale in the comments below!