Steam Updates Sale Schedule, Drops One Sale for Another

If you’re one of Steam’s many deal-hunters who’s looking for their next bargain on a PC game, you’ll want to be aware of a shift in sales announced for 2023. Starting next year, Valve says it’ll start holding a Spring Sale every year with the inaugural start to this trend scheduled to take place from March 16th to March 23rd of next year. This new sale comes at a cost, however: in order to maintain its schedule of four seasonal sales a year, Valve is ditching the Lunar New Year Sale to make room for this one.

The announcement was shared in a post on the Steam site which was directed at publishers and developers but has been of note for all Steam users regardless. Valve said adding a Spring Sale to the mix works in two ways by delivering on a request from the developer and publisher community and also providing more space between the sales that take place each year.

“We’ll be making a change to our usual cadence of four major seasonal sales, and we wanted to communicate this information now to help you plan your sales promotions and business operations accordingly,” Valve said. “Starting in calendar year 2023, we’ll be replacing the Lunar New Year Sale with the Spring Sale as one of the four major seasonal sales.”

The Lunar New Year Sale was taken away not because it was too close to when a Spring Sale would happen but because it was too close to the big deals typically seen in December. This year’s Lunar New Year Sale, for example, started on February 3rd. Valve said it’d received feedback that the Lunar New Year discounts were too close to the holiday ones during winter, and Valve seemed pretty confident that publishers will still discount their games around the Lunar New Year festivities anyway if they choose to do so.

“We think many publishers will still opt to discount games around the Lunar New Year holiday, using the custom discount tools,” Valve said. “But we suspect customers will be better served by a little bit more time between the big Steam-wide seasonal sales.”

The next big sale to look forward to is the Autumn Sale that’ll go from November 22nd to November 29th. The Winter Sale will follow that from December 22nd to January 5th, and then it’s time for the Spring Sale.