When Is the Best Time of Year to Buy AAA Games Cheap
Sale timing is more predictable than it looks. This is the calendar the big storefronts have run on for years, and what each window is good for.
Game pricing runs on a calendar, and it has been broadly the same calendar for a decade. Once you know the shape of it, the question stops being “is this a good discount” and becomes “is this the best discount I’ll see in the next eight weeks”, which is a much easier question to answer.
The annual shape
Late June to mid July: the deepest cuts of the year
The Steam Summer Sale is the single most significant event on the PC calendar and every other storefront schedules against it. Two weeks, aggressive discounts, and the point at which most back catalogue titles hit or match their all-time low.
Console equivalents cluster around the same period. If you’re only going to pay attention to one window, make it this one.
Late November: broad rather than deep
Black Friday through Cyber Monday. What distinguishes it is coverage rather than depth. Recent releases that won’t appear in a Steam sale at any meaningful discount often get their first real cut here, because retail competition forces publishers to participate.
For a game released earlier that year, this is usually the first genuinely worthwhile price. For anything older, the summer sale probably beat it.
Late December into early January: the winter sale
Close to summer sale pricing on most back catalogue, and it runs across the holiday period when people have time to play. Slightly weaker than summer on average, but the gap is small enough that waiting six months to save €2 isn’t a serious plan.
March and October: the mid-season sales
Steam runs Spring and Autumn sales that sit a tier below the big two. Useful for filling gaps, rarely the moment a title hits its floor.
Publisher weeks, scattered throughout
Individual publisher sales run constantly and are genuinely unpredictable. These are where a specific franchise gets a deeper cut than it would in a general event, particularly around an anniversary or ahead of a sequel announcement.
How a single game ages
Independent of the calendar, most AAA titles follow a recognisable curve:
- Launch to three months: full price, give or take an occasional 10 to 15% preorder or launch discount, which is marketing rather than saving.
- Three to six months: first real cut, typically 25 to 33%, usually arriving at the first major sale event after launch.
- Six to twelve months: 40 to 50%. This is where most people should be buying most games.
- Year one to two: 60 to 75%, plus a complete or definitive edition that bundles the DLC for less than the base game cost at launch.
- Beyond two years: 75% and up, with the floor set by whatever the publisher considers the game’s long term value.
The exceptions are worth knowing. Nintendo first party titles essentially don’t follow this curve and hold value for years. A small number of critical darlings with no live service component also resist discounting, because they keep selling without needing it.
The strategy that works
Buy at launch only for games you’ll genuinely play in the first month. Everything else goes on a wishlist with a price alert, and you buy it during the summer or winter sale at whatever the price has become. This sounds obvious and almost nobody does it, because sales create urgency and urgency is the entire point of them.
Worth adding: a game bought at 70% off and never installed is a worse deal than a game bought at full price and finished. The backlog is the real cost of good sale timing, and it’s worth being honest about how many of those cheap purchases you actually open.