Over the last year, Valve has been more forthcoming about plans for its biggest Steam sales, including by revealing the dates well ahead of time. The company says the cadence will change starting in 2023. It will replace the Lunar New Year sale (which debuted in 2016) with the spring sale, which will run from March 16th to 23rd.
Valve said a spring sale was a popular request from developers and publishers, many of whom believed that the Lunar New Year edition (which typically took place in late January or early February) ran too close to the December holiday sale. “It will allow us to create more space between our four major seasonal sales and provide more opportunities throughout the year for developers to expand and execute their discounting calendar,” Valve added in a blog post. “We think many publishers will still opt to discount games around the Lunar New Year holiday, using the custom discount tools. But we suspect customers will be better served by a little bit more time between the big Steam-wide seasonal sales.”
This makes sense, as the winter sale is arguably one of Steam’s two biggest events of the year, alongside the summer one. Spacing things out more could be helpful for developers and publishers (that said, there’s not much time between the autumn and winter editions). Moreover, this move will shorten what was a lengthy gap between the Lunar New Year and summer sales, which could be handy for those who receive a Steam Deck and don’t want to wait too long to pick up a ton of discounted games for it.
Meanwhile, Valve reiterated the dates for the next two major sales. The autumn edition will run from November 22nd to 29th, while the blockbuster winter sale will take place between December 22nd and January 5th.