2024’s Steam Winter Sale kicked off earlier today, bringing a vast number of deep discounts to PC games big and small between now and January 2.
At the end of every year, Valve holds a massive Steam Winter Sale on its PC gaming launcher and storefront. For two weeks, developers have a platform to discount their games on Steam; we often see all-time-low prices for high-profile games during this event. This year’s Winter Sale runs concurrently to the 2024 Steam Awards, where Steam users can vote for their favorite titles in categories like Game of the Year and Best Game on Steam Deck. Voting for the 2024 Steam Awards ends at 10 a.m. PT on December 31, while the Steam Winter Sale will run until 10 a.m. PT on January 2, 2025.
While I recommend looking at your own Steam Wishlist and checking out the store pages of games you’re interested in to see if they’ve been discounted, Steam’s Featured Deep Discounts roundup for the Winter Sale is also a good place to start. The Featured Deep Discounts page highlights massive discounts for beloved PC games. This time around, titles like Titanfall 2, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Metro Exodus, State of Decay 2: Juggernaut Edition, The Forest, Firewatch, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Stellaris, Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition, Assassin’s Creed Origins, and Tales from the Borderlands have all been discounted by 90% and now only cost a few bucks.
Regardless of what you want to get during this sale, if you’ve been saving money to buy some PC games this year, now’s the time to spend it before the Steam Winter Sale ends on January 2, 2025.
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 One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it.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.