The 2021 Steam Winter Sale has begun, discounting thousands of games on the virtual storefront in what Valve is calling the biggest sale of the year.

The 2021 Steam Winter Sale has officially begun, discounting thousands of games in what Valve is touting as the platform's biggest sale of the year. The website has a long history of offering large sales, and its user base has a similar history of engaging with them. Last month's Autumn Sale saw Steam break its concurrent user record on Sunday, November 28th, during the weekend of Black Friday.

While sales like these enrich Steam's present, the distribution platform also has a very interesting future thanks to the Steam Deck. The handheld console is set to allow users to take their PC games on the go using a device that's superficially quite similar to a Nintendo Switch. Interest in the new device is high, but unfortunately, intrigued gamers will have to wait to experience it. While the console was originally set to release at the end of this year, it has since been delayed, and is now set to release in February 2022. Valve revealed that the Steam Deck's delay was due to supply issues, placing the blame specifically on components not arriving at warehouses in time for the machines to be assembled.

Related: Steam Deck Won't Have Exclusive Games, Valve Confirms

This hardware delay has not hindered Steam as a digital marketplace, though. As revealed in a blog post on the Steam website, thousands of games are discounted from now until January 5th, at 10 AM PT. In addition to the deals one can expect from a Steam sale, fans can check the storefront every two days for a free sticker from the sale's Yeti mascot. This should serve as a quaint treat to be served alongside a myriad of deals, including half off prominent titles like Deathloop, No Man's Sky, and Horizon Zero Dawn. In addition to these offers, fans can also begin casting votes for the 2021 Steam Awards, celebrating the year's best Steam games in an online counterpart to the prestigious Game Awards, which were hosted earlier this month.

Steam is a considerably prominent platform, and not just for selling games. In recent months, video game fans have begun paying more attention to Steam reviews on a title, taking them as a significant indicator of how the community at large feels about a title. A prominent example of the sort of sway Steam reviews hold could be seen when eFootball 2022 became the platform's worst-reviewed game ever due to a myriad of technical issues and unappealing character models. More recently, Battlefield 2042 appeared on Steam's worst-reviewed games list, due to a similar lack of polish and an abundance of glitches. Time will tell if any prominent Winter Sale purchases end up seeing similar negative attention.

Despite the ever-increasing efforts of the Epic Games Store, Steam remains the first storefront on most fans' minds when they think of PC gaming. Major sales like the 2021 Winter Sale are a time-honored tradition for the site, and fans are likely already flooding it to look for the best deals. Thanks to developments like the Steam Deck, the future of the platform is hard to predict, but at least sales like the Steam Winter Sale can be relied on.

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Peter has been playing video games ever since he was a child, pulling his chair up to the TV so he could hold the GameCube controller for Wind Waker. Video games have been a vital part of his life ever since. They've been an important piece of his academic career as well; at the University of Redlands, where he studied Creative Writing and Theater, he once submitted a philosophy paper on the video game Soma. Today, in addition to his freelance work for Screen Rant, Peter spends most of his time blogging, playing Dungeons & Dragons, and, of course, playing video games. He believes that video games are an important and oft overlooked medium for telling stories, as well as an excellent medium for having fun. His favorite video game is still Wind Waker, the one that started it all, and he credits the fun he had with that game as the reason he's here writing for Screen Rant today.