The Steam Summer Sale has started

If you're sick of notE3 taunting you with games you can see but not play, surprise! Here come Valve with a huge sale on so very, very many video games for you to play today. The 2020 Steam Summer Sale just launched and... many, many games are discounted until July 9th. Steam has has also opened a Points Shops, where points you earn by buying regular Steam stuff can be swapped for emoticons, profile backgrounds, animated stickers, avatar frames, and other vanity bits. And as is Steam sale tradition, the servers are now stumbling.

The Steam Summer Sale will end at 6pm (10am Pacific) on July 9th. Until then, hell, go to Steam and have a look. I hope you've been sitting on a wishlist because this is a bit too large to casually browse. The RPS Steam Curator page does have a lot of games we've liked and, while it is now a little out of date, we do plan to revive that with fresh hot picks.

Maybe we'll be back at you with more particular recommendations tomorrow. My previous go-to is off the table, as Deadly Premonition is once again not included in the sale. It was a lot easier back when I could say "Look, it crashes and the combat sucks, but for £2 go try this game I hope you will adore as much as I do."

If you're more interested in making your profile pretty, head on over to the Points Shop. Along with new specially-created bits and pieces for Steam profiles and Steam Chat, it stocks items previously limited to trading card badges. Perhaps I will finally complete my collection of Deadly Premonition emoticons.

Each £1 you spend on Steam gets you 124 points. Then you're looking at maybe 100 for a Steam emoticon, 1000 for an animated sticker for Steam chat, 2000 for an animated profile background, 3000 for an animated avatar... that's a lot of money to get something basically pointless, but you get points anyway, and it's all basically pointless anyway. See this page for more on how it all works, and hit the shop to see what you can get.

I am surprised to find I already have thousands of points, presumably from past purchases? I just spent 2000 on a retrofuturistic pink neon frame for my Steam avatar because, idk, I had them and what else was I going to use them for. Still got thousands left. 2000 more to put a swirly ink background on the Steam profile I never look at? Sure!

Please, please, please don't spend money on Steam just to get more points for vanity bits.

Disclosure: I have some pals at Valve, who do... things?