This year, the company is changing its sales schedule to coincide with the holiday season. This will allow customers to buy games at a discounted price and then use those games to purchase other products. Steam also plans on releasing new games during the holiday season, which will give customers an opportunity to purchase them at a discounted price as well.
In 2023, we’ll still have four major seasonal sales. The Lunar New Year sale, though, is no more. In its place, we’ll have a spring sale now. This means that Steam now has one seasonal sale for each season: autumn, spring, winter, and summer. The first Steam spring sale will take place from March 16th through March 23rd, 2023, after the autumn sale that’s scheduled to begin on November 22nd and the winter sale for December 22nd.
As for the reason why Steam is opting to kill the Lunar New Year sale, Valve received feedback from users saying that the sale often landed too close to the winter sale. The winter sale in 2021 took place from December 22nd to January 5th, 2022, while the Lunar New Year sale came by just three weeks later, on January 27th, and went through February 5th.
The Lunar New Year sale was first held in 2016 as a gesture from Steam to celebrate game developers and users hailing from Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and South Korea. Although the games that were discounted there weren’t necessarily always Asian-made games, as games such as Tom Clancy: Rainbow Six Siege and Red Dead Redemption II saw discounts on the last Lunar New Year sale.
So really, not a lot is changing: you’ll just now have a generic spring sale at the beginning of spring rather than a bustling Lunar New Year sale just weeks after the winter sale.
Source: Steam
