Every year Steam launches a holiday-theme sales event, and every year we wind up spending more money on games than gifts for our families. Well, we hope you didn’t max out your credit cards, yet because it’s that time of the year again.
This morning the Steam Winter Sale touched down, and will come to an end next week, on December 29. That means that starting now, you’ll be able to spend a negligible amount of money on relatively new releases and – for perhaps the third or fourth time – a copy of Borderlands 2.
Steam Winter Sale On Now! Plus, Vote For The Steam Awards! #SteamSale #SteamAwards https://t.co/2Ltx8oYpVP pic.twitter.com/T3iqTvsPgI
— Steam (@Steam) December 22, 2016
This news comes only about a month after the Steam Autumn Sale, which included deals on games like Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and Civilization VI. Like the previous sale, Valve is simultaneously holding a vote on the Steam Awards, which presents users with a range of different categories to pick their favorites in.
The first category, for instance, is “The Villain Most in Need of a Hug Award.” The contenders come from titles such as Borderlands 2, Dead by Daylight, Far Cry 3, Far Cry 4, and Portal 2. We can assume based on past sales that these games will be sold at a discount at the same time.
Just like last year, this year’s Winter Sale features some seriously deep discounts on brand-new titles and series — including the entire Doom series for 40 percent to 67 percent off. Last year we saw “thousands of games and software” marked down with Winter Sale-flavored specialty trading cards thrown into the mix. This time around, we’re seeing even more games go on sale, which makes sense, considering 38 percent of the entire Steam catalog was released in 2016, according to Steam Spy on Twitter.
38% of all Steam games were released in 2016 pic.twitter.com/JiX2pt6JhB
— Steam Spy (@Steam_Spy) November 30, 2016
It’s also not a bad time to pick up some last minute Steam Gifts for the gamers in your life.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.