Hear that? It’s the sound of hundreds of developers and publishers holding their breath. They’ve been tasked with hiding Valve’s stadium of sales in plain sight, and by and large, it’s worked.
By and large. All it takes is a rogue banner ad here, an unexplained new trading card there, and we start to see the outline of the Steam Summer Sale. It looks like it’s set to begin tomorrow.
Three key clues point to a week-and-a-half long wallet-wilting affair, beginning June 19 and ending June 30.
We first noticed Neogaffers noticing Steam Summer Sale adverts from paysafecard nearly a week ago. But the Spanish-language safe payment service haven’t taken down references to the upcoming event as you might expect – in fact the same Summer Sale promotion sits front and centre on their official website.
Add to that the hundreds of self-described Mysterious Cards doing the rounds on the Steam community market. Built from crafting card sets, they appear to relate to a store meta-game just waiting to be triggered by Valve.
And finally, the canny folk at SteamDB have noticed that Steam’s current week-long deals are scheduled to finish a day early this week – tomorrow, June 19. They’ve taken that as confirmation that the all-consuming Summer Sale is due to begin then.
If a Steam Summer Sale were to break out tomorrow, would you be prepared? Better buy in some beans, I suppose.