The Steam Winter Sale kicks off with deals on some of 2025's biggest games, including PC Gamer's 2025 Game of the Year

Steam Winter Sale 2025: Official Trailer - YouTube

Winter is the worst time of year. It's cold, it's wet, it's dark, the roads are terrible, and cooking on the grill is a full-on headache. The only thing that doesn't suck about winter is the onslaught of big year-ending videogame sales, and the big daddy of them all is now underway: The 2025 Steam Winter Sale has begun.

It's particularly notable that some of the year's biggest releases are getting markdowns for the festive finale including Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, PC Gamer's 2025 Game of the Year, which is half-price in the Winter Sale—the first time it's gone that low.

A handful of examples pulled from Steam's promo trailer:

Marvel's Spider-Man 2
RV There Yet?
Borderlands 4
Dune: Awakening
Dying Light: The Beast
Rematch
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2
Megabonk
REPO
Assassin's Creed Shadows
Escape From Duckov
Dispatch (another GOTY winner, in case you missed that)
Deltarune
Elden Ring: Nightreign
Hades 2

The other big thing to watch for is the Steam Awards: The nominees across 11 distinct categories now stand revealed, and you can now cast your vote for your favorites. You've got until the end of the Steam Winter Sale to mark your ballots—winners will be announced on January 3, 2026.

And while it's not directly related to the Winter Sale, Steam also kicked off its annual year-end Replay yesterday, an accounting of all you did on the big storefront, and how it compares to the rest of the world. It's a surprisingly (some may say alarmingly) detailed rundown, but one thing that shines through for all of us (in the aggregate, anyway) is that we really like our older games: Only 14% of playtime spent by Steam users was put into new games. (Personally, I put 68% of my Steam time into new releases, but it wasn't really my fault.)

Bongo Cat, who in this image is not wearing a very fine hat — (Image credit: Marcel Zurawka)

While the Steam Winter Sale is the undisputed king of the hill, it behooves me to point out that it's worth shopping around while you're digging for deals: The Epic Games Store traditionally doesn't have the super-deep discounts of Steam sales but its Epic Rewards program can sometimes can more than make up for it, and Epic is also doing its regular year-end game giveaway extravaganza—17 free games in total over the course of its holiday sale. GOG is running a winter sale of its own, which I always love browsing through because I can set my desired maximum price to like $2 and have literally dozens of things to browse through that I'd never run across anywhere else.

The 2025 Steam Winter Sale is live now and runs until 10 am PT/1 pm ET on January 2. See any exceptionally good deals the world needs to know about? Let us know in the comments.

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Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.

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