Steam confirms Christmas sale date and more free Steam Decks

Valve is fully into the festive season, announcing another Steam Deck giveaway and a flurry of games whose prices will be slashed over the holidays and into the new year.

In case you missed it, Valve hosted a giveaway of swishy Steam Decks over the course of The Game Awards 2022. The device is essentially a portable PC and truth be told, I've tried to resist the hype for the Steam Deck since its reveal, and my resolve is wearing thin. Inside, the custom-built AMD APU and 16GB of dual-channel LPDDR5 RAM outstrips the gigabytes per second per teraflop performance of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles. While it's whizzy, it's not necessarily going to give you whizzy visuals on that smaller screen, but this is still an awesome achievement.

Check out the trailer for all that the Steam Deck can do below!

At this point, a lot of us are au fait with Valve's generous sales that it hosts across the year. The Winter Sale is going live on 22 December and will end on 5 January, giving you a hefty window of time to "um" and "ah" over checking out with that cart of games you've had your eye on for the past couple of months. The full list of games isn't out there yet, however, Ready or Not, Two Point Campus, Persona 5 Royal, Naraka: Bladepoint and Sonic Frontiers did feature in the Winter Sale trailer.

Now, onto the second Steam Deck giveaway. “The team was so blown away by the overwhelming response to The Game Awards event that we’ve decided to give away another round of Steam Decks,” said Valve, explaining that 171 people are up for a chance of pocketing the portable PC. These 171 players are among those who registered to watch The Game Awards 2022, so, all you need to do is check your email inbox for the address you use for your Steam account to see if you've won.