Steam's Winter Sale Start Time Confirmed, Brace Yourselves

Bargains falling, all around us. Gaben playing, having fun. Spending money on games that we don't need. Steam Winter Sale, everyone.

That's right boys and girls, it's that time of the year. The Steam Winter Sale is upon us once again. Starting today (December 19th) at 6pm UK time, Valve's digital storefront will be filled with all kinds of delightful bargains for us to fill our festive boots with.

And by that, I mean we'll all panic-buy more games than we'll ever need because the price is so attractive... and well over half of the games we pick up will inevitably end up sitting in our Steam library forever. Untouched and unloved. Hey, we all do it.

Valve looks set to announce Steam Cloud Gaming

It's unclear what festive bargains we can expect this year, but the Winter Sale tends to offer a decent mix of indie games and big AAA releases at pretty great prices.

The last few years, for example, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has been available for under a tenner, which has inspired me to embark on my own annual tradition: harass a friend until they buy the CD Projekt RED RPG because it's bloody brilliant. No doubt I'll be getting to do that again this year.

As always, the Steam Winter Sale runs for two weeks before disappearing into the ether with all our money. That means this year's will end on January 2nd, 2020. You've got plenty of time to spend your Christmas cash, then. Assuming you get any, that is. I usually end up with a WH Smith's voucher, which I'm fairly certain you can't actually use on Steam.

Look, it's hard to illustrate this story

In addition to the sale going live, we'll also find out the winners of the player-voted Steam Awards. The ultimate Game Of The Year prize is between Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Resident Evil 2, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Destiny 2 and Devil May Cry 5 this year. It'll be interesting to see which comes out on top, especially after Sekiro's surprise win at The Game Awards last week.

You can see the rest of the nominees in each category below:

• Game of the Year: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Resident Evil 2, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Destiny 2 and Devil May Cry 5
• VR Game of the Year: Beat Saber, Blade & Sorcery, Gorn, Borderlands 2 VR and Five Nights at Freddy's Help Wanted.
• Labour of Love: Warframe, Rainbow Six Siege, CS:GO, Grand Theft Auto V and Dota 2.
• Better with Friends: Risk of Rain 2, Dota Underlords, Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, Ring of Elysium and DayZ
• Most Innovative Gameplay: Baba is You, Slay the Spire, My Friend Pedro, Oxygen Not Included and Planet Zoo
• Outstanding Story-Rich Game: Plague Tale Innocence, Disco Elysium, Far Cry New Dawn, Gears 5 and GreedFall
• Best Game You Suck At: Mordhau, Code Vein, Hunt Showdown, Remnant From the Ashes and Mortal Kombat 11
• Outstanding Visual Style: Gris, Total War: Three Kingdoms, Astroneer, Katana Zero and Subnautica: Below Zero

Topics: Valve, Steam, PC