Steam has been going a bit crazy with sales lately. They haven't all been mind-blowing but it seems like there's a new one every time I check the store. There was that three-day Halloween Sale, then a week-long Autumn Sale for Thanksgiving and Black Friday... and I guess this is pretty normal, so far, but there was also the recent week-long sale of controller-compatible games to celebrate the Big Picture feature coming out of beta, and that particular event ended only a week ago.
Now, with only a week before Christmas Eve, it's just about time for the highly anticipated 2012 Winter Sale, which will run through the holidays. I'm not exactly sure when it will start, but it should be sometime in the next few days. (Last year, it began on Monday, December 19; the year before that, it began on Monday, December 20; and the year before that, it began on Monday, December 21. Since today is a Monday with no sale, and the event is unlikely to start as late as December 24, we can be pretty sure that the Monday pattern won't hold; instead, I'm betting on a start date of Thursday, December 20, give or take a day.)
The Winter Sale is typically the best sale of the year on Steam, rivaled only by the Summer Sale. In other words, it's kind of a big deal. The holiday season, of course, is the best time to buy video games anywhere — GOG, for example, is having a sale right now — but Steam is so well known for its discounts that other distributors get mad and pretend that sales are a bad thing even though developers completely disagree. And yes, this particular sale is a biggie.
So if you're planning to do some video game shopping on Steam in the coming days, it helps to be prepared. Unfortunately, some people don't really understand how Steam sales work, either because they've never seen one or because they don't pay attention. They buy a game on the first day of the sale when it's 50% off, and then they get mad when the game's price is bumped to 75% off just a couple of days later. This is great for the people who made the game, I guess — so go ahead and pay more than necessary in order to support the industry if you want to — but as long as developers are willing to apply deep discounts to their games during daily deals and flash sales, you might as well take advantage of it.
With that goal in mind, I've created a helpful flow chart, seen below.
The same rules certainly might apply to other online stores whose holiday sales have a similar format of long-lasting (mediocre) discounts punctuated by short-lived (much better) deals. In any case, you really shouldn't buy a game from any online store, especially Steam, if it's not on sale and there's likely to be a sale just around the corner... that is, I mean, unless you like paying four times as much as everyone else. There's no reason to be in such a rush that you buy something too early. Since digitally distributed goods are delivered instantaneously, you'd be a fool not to wait until the last minute.
I just wish I could buy video games for everyone I know. Picking out gifts for younger people is so easy. The older people in my family, on the other hand... well, if they don't start giving me hints really soon, it's gift cards for all of them.
Happy Holidays!
Update (December 20, 2012):
My estimate for the start of the Steam sale was dead-on. I feel so special.
