2022’s Final Steam Sale Dates Revealed

It’s nearly Steam sale season once again. This year’s Summer Sale may be long since over, but Valve isn’t finished bleeding our collective wallets dry just yet. Valve has now revealed the dates for the final two major sale events of 2022, as well as the first noteworthy sale of 2023. For a change of pace, I didn’t learn about these newly-publicized dates from the wizards over at SteamDB, but rather courtesy of Eurogamer. With all of that said, let’s get to the details, shall we?

First up comes this year’s Autumn Sale. It’ll run for one week, from Tuesday, November 22nd to 29th. That lengthy duration should give us Americans plenty of time to overload ourselves on newly-purchased games after we recover from overloading ourselves on food during Thanksgiving celebrations. Exactly one month after the Autumn Sale begins, of course, comes Steam’s last hurrah for the year in the form of the Winter Sale.

As is tradition, this event will last for two weeks, from Thursday, December 22nd to January 5th, 2023. If precedent is anything to go by, I’m sure that during one of these sale events, voting will begin for 2022’s annual Steam Awards. The categories for those are usually revealed during the Autumn Sale so that voting can begin, and then a list of finalists is drawn up and presented for final voting during the Winter Sale. Winning games in the Steam Awards are then typically announced a couple of days before the end of that sale event.

With the Winter Sale covered, that brings us to 2023’s first major Steam sale and with it comes a rather interesting announcement from Valve. The first Steam Spring Sale (similar to the Autumn Sale in that it will also last for one week) will run from Thursday, March 16th to March 23rd. They’ve stated that going forward, this sale will replace the now-retired Lunar New Year Sale.

Valve’s explanation for this change is as follows: “We first ran a Lunar New Year sale on Steam back in 2016 to celebrate the influx of game developers and publishers from territories like Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and South Korea. Publishers and players worldwide were excited about the additional opportunity for a big Steam sale. However, over the years we’ve received feedback that Lunar New Year was often much too close to the December holiday sale period. We think many publishers will still opt to discount games around the Lunar New Year holiday, using the custom discount tools.”

For what it’s worth, I think I agree with Valve on this one. Since the Lunar New Year sale often took place closer to the previous year’s Winter Sale than the planned Spring Sales will, my wallet usually hadn’t had enough time to recover from those festivities when it was figuratively bombarded with yet another sale. I think the planned changes to this particular sale event will help Steam users like myself who might live on fixed incomes. Then again, you could argue that people like me simply shouldn’t go overboard when buying games if we live on fixed incomes, but that would be against the spirit of the holidays, wouldn’t it?