Steam Winter Sale 2025

The Steam Winter Sale 2025 is, to put it bluntly, meh. Trending with other big events recently it seems that the wow factor is missing. Yes there are games that are discounted 90% but maybe fatigue is creeping in.

About a month ago I started tracking a potential new co-op game to play with my brother, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora™. It recently had (in my opinion) a rare regular price drop for a Ubisoft game from $69.99 USD to $29.99 USD on 10/22/25. That is $40.00 off permanently which is unheard of for a "AAAA" publisher.

Just a month prior to this the game went on temporary sale for $17.99 USD on 9/29/25. I falsely believed that with the winter sale around the corner, that surely the price would drop even lower so, I placed it on my wish list and waited.

Today with the beginning of that major sales event, the game is marked down to just $20.09 USD. I would have been better off buying it in September than waiting for the big end of year event.

There are many "deals" to be had with this sale, with those being had is us the consumer.

This sale sucks.

Civilization VI Quick and Dirty Review (Updated)

I got this game as part of a recent Humble Bundle and have toyed around with it a bit. This morning I tried my first earnest game and immediately ran into a well-known yet still unresolved bug, where unit combat sounds stop working. Well, they will work for one engagement, and then not work for the next two, then work for the next, then not for the next, etc. Basically, it is a dice roll whether or not the combat sounds will work for any encounter.

Assassin’s Creed II

Back in 2012 I was full bore into my Steam whore phase where anything that even remotely looked interesting that was on a deeply discounted sale I would invariably pick up. I have dozens of games that I have either only played a few minutes in, and some I have never even installed (after five + years of ownership). During the 2012 Christmas sale I picked up Assassin's Creed II: Deluxe Edition for $4.99, as well as Assassin's Creed, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood Deluxe, and Assassin's Creed Revelations - Gold Edition for $4.99 - $7.49 each.

Steam Winter Sale - ArmA 3

There were several games that I picked up for Christmas during the Steam Winter Sale: American Truck Simulator, ArmA 3, Dishonored, South Park, Tabletop Simulator, as well as some DLC for a race management game that I am heavily into called Motorsport Manager.

I took a look at ArmA 3 a full three years ago during a Steam Free Play Weekend offer and was not impressed with what I saw, given the price point at that time (it was going for $59.99 USD and was marked down that weekend to $29.99). I noted an issue with armor crews bailing yet continuing on the assigned waypoint as if they could possibly contribute to the battle.

Breach & Clear Sale

Breach & Clear is currently on sale at Steam for 90% off at $1.49 USD. It can be bundled with Breach & Clear: Deadline Rebirth for $2.99 USD. While I have both games I really could not get into the changes they made with Deadline Rebirth and haven't played it in quite some time. The original B&C however is a very well made turn-based tactical tactical game that is well worth the full price of $14.99 and is a steal at 90% off.

Angry Gamers Get Creation Clubbed

There is a good article over at RPS detailing the issues that Steam is experiencing with portions of the gaming community in revolt over questionable moves by developers, such as with paid mods in the form of Creation Club for Skyrim and Fallout 4.

These hostile review actions are meant to punish developers for unpopular decisions, and apparently are affecting the bottom line as the retailer (Steam) is forced to deploy data graphs to explain away anger spikes, and the developer (Bethesda) is forced to have a fire sale on their initial content offering, putting up some items for free after requiring users to pay credits (cash) for them.

Fallout 4 Creation Club

For those of you who do not know Bethesda released something called the Creation Club, which is now fully integrated with Fallout 4. It is basically paid mods, and this post is not to debate the pros and cons of that. This post is to rant on how Bethesda screwed my game up. I use mods to improve the game, and one of those mods for me had to be the Achievements Mods Enabler so that I could work towards the 80 or so Steam Achievements that come with the game.

Fallout 4 Review

A couple of months ago I declared Skyrim as the greatest video game that I have ever played. That statement is now under serious assault from a title that I largely ignored for over a year. The fact that they are both from the same developer is quite astounding in my opinion. The only other Fallout game I played was New Vegas, and it is the only title in the first-person series to be done by a different developer. I didn’t much care for it and basically dismissed the series as cartoonish.

SITREP

This is just a quick post to let everyone who visits this blog know that I am alive and well. I have been playing a lot of Skyrim SE and have 74 out of the 75 achievements on Steam. The last one will take quite a bit of grinding since on this build I am not making any of the skills legendary, so I sit at level 71 with 7 levels to go to spawn the necessary dragon to kill for the final achievement at level 78. Once all that is said and done with I plan on setting Skyrim aside and focusing on other games.

Skyrim SE Thoughts

Recently I have been playing a lot of the Skyrim Special Edition that was released last October. While I am grateful to the developer for providing this full game free of charge to owners of the original game and all DLC, I must wonder why they didn’t take some development opportunity to fix some major bugs in the game which were successfully addressed over the years by the Unofficial Skyrim Patch (USSEP). Seriously, what were they thinking?

Steam Slitherine Weekend Deal

There is a really good sale going on at Steam this weekend featuring a number of Slitherine products at a substantial discount. I picked up Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear for $9.89 (67% off the retail price of $29.99). Interestingly enough this appears to be a Steam only sale as the full price for that game is listed on the storefronts of both Matrix Games and Slitherine Games. The discounts range from 35% to as much as 75%, with significant savings on some great games such as Flashpoint Campaigns: RedStorm, Vietnam ’65, as well as the Decisive Campaigns series of games. The sale runs through Monday 3/13/17.

Steam Sale

There is a pretty good Monday sale going on over at Steam starting today, with a number of decent titles that have substantial discounts (some deeper than what was found during what I regard a weak Winter Sale just recently completed). I picked up the following five titles to add to my growing library of games that I do not play:

Cities Skylines Springfield Update

The following screenshots are of a winter map that I am working on in the Snowfall DLC. There are a number of outstanding maintenance issues that appear in several images (such as water and sewage capacity needing to be increased). The present population is approximately 69,000 (I have previously reached the Metropolis Milestone when I surpassed 55K). In my gameplay experience so far this is about the point that I start experiencing issues with low volume traffic solutions resulting in the necessity to expand capacity.

Musings from a Budget Airline Captain

For the past couple of days I have taken a semi-break from my latest crack addiction Cities Skylines to revisit some older tried and true titles to provide some gaming balance. One of those go to games is Microsoft Flight Simulator X where I love to pilot (from takeoff to landing) a virtual Boeing 737-800. My go to route is Jacksonville to Daytona because it is an easy and short flight that covers all of the bases of navigation.

Cities Skylines Snowfall & After Dark DLC

During the recent Steam Winter Sale I picked up a couple of DLC for Cities Skylines (After Dark and Snowfall). The Snowfall DLC is currently $12.99 regular price on Steam and presently has a review status of mixed, which I happen to disagree with. While there are some things that they could have more fully fleshed out, there are many more features of this expansion that make it worth the regular price. I started one of the three snow maps as a test and ended up spending all my current city building time plowing snow.

Cities Skylines Sub Theory

This evening when expanding my corpse recycler of a city I noticed that my subway line (which I was quite proud of at the time of inception) was as backed up as a toilet in a turnpike restroom. My first inclination was to provide bypasses to each stop when it finally dawned on my noob city planner self that each subway stop stopped at each stop thereafter, making bypasses effectively useless. Cims go to work, play, shop, and then come back home. What they do not do is hop on public transport of any type and go visit another cim (bunch of introverts).

Cities Skylines Megadeth

While my city has been progressing along with some minor death spikes resulting in population loss here and there, I have mostly been able to get through them without too much of an issue. Today I experienced a massive population drop which resulted in corpses piling up, abandoned buildings accumulating all over the map, and the resulting loss in property value and tax revenues that go along with it.

Skyrim Special Edition

My video card is a four year old AMD Radeon HD 7770 2GB that came installed in an off the shelf Gateway computer that I purchased brand new. This card is below the Skyrim Special Edition minimum video card requirement of at least a NVIDIA GTX 470 1GB /AMD HD 7870 2GB. This caused me quite a bit of concern as I had heavily modded the original Skyrim yet still was set at Ultra in the graphics detection application that is part of the startup of the game. Going into the Special Edition I had no idea if I would even be able to run the game, much less play it at an acceptable level.

War Stories: Operation Aurora

The following post is an after-action summary of the first single player mission of the story campaign in Battlefield Bad Company 2 that takes place on October 6, 1944. Somewhere in the Sea of Japan a small group of US commandos are sent to extract a Japanese scientist from an island who has war-decisive information in his possession. The fate of the mission was kept from the public and all records destroyed, relegating it to the scrap heap of battlefield myths.

Flashpoint Campaigns

I am currently working on a battle plan for the Flashpoint Campaigns: Germany Reforged scenario “Ardennes Revisited”. This is the Soviet version of the scenario as I am working on completing the Red Army mission set since I played the original game scenarios from Flashpoint Germany as NATO (and in that mission I scored a Decisive Victory outcome). This first go around is a bit of a boot camp for me since I have been away from the game for a few months, and it shows in both my initial decision making and later turn execution.