While that initial hardware cost of PC gaming can sting a bit, once you’re in the games and software can be very cheap, especially with a little help from Steam Hype. While Sony and Nintendo might want you paying upwards of £70 for a new game, there’s seldom a reason to, with a little savvy shopping, pay more than £45 on PC, even at launch! Plus, the discounts can get huge during sales season.
While it might be tempting to just pick up stuff the moment you get a notification email from Steam that it’s discounted, you can save a lot of money by following these handy tips:
Maintain a large wishlist
Even if your brain-goblins tell you to keep clutter to a minimum, it’s often a useful idea to add every game that even vaguely interests you to your Steam wishlist. Not only will this get you notifications when it does get discounted, but the Steam Wishlist page can be filtered by items on sale, genre, how big the discounts are and more. But the other reason is…
Let other sites do the legwork for you
There are several bargain-tracking sites but our go-to is IsThereAnyDeal, which tracks prices across a broad range of sites and tells you if a game is unusually cheap now, or has been cheaper previously. You can often get significant savings compared to Steam and it doesn’t include any sketchy key resellers – it’s all vetted retail outlets. Just double-check that it’s a Steam key you’re buying, unless you’re cool with GOG or Epic. Once you’ve made an account on IsThereAnyDeal, you can have it tap into your Steam Wishlist and inform you of deals across all of those sites.
Bundles, Humble & Otherwise
It’s always worth a quick poke around bundle-heavy storefronts such as Fanatical, Humble, Green Man Gaming and Digiphile. Better yet, IsThereAnyDeal tracks most of them for you. Each has its own system but almost all offer big bundles of games on Steam. The discounts are often so steep that it might be cheaper to snag one game you really wanted along with several others. It’s also worth noting that the Humble Choice (a subscription bundle service run by IGN) also builds up a major discount on the store – up to 20% after a year. This stacks on top of the store’s regular discounts so you can often get 30% or more off a brand new AAA game before it even launches.
Free stuff is cool
A surprising number of great games are given away for free, especially on the Epic Games Store, which often doles out two titles every week and one a day running through their end-of-year celebrations. Once again, IsThereAnyDeal tracks everything available and it seldom hurts to spend a minute or two a week just adding freebies to your account. Some really big stuff has been given away too, including Death Stranding: Director’s Cut, A Plague Tale: Innocence and the entire Batman Arkham Trilogy. Steam gets the occasional giveaway too, but less frequently.
Organize your library
Lastly, not quite a sales tip but if you shop around and snag freebies, you’ll build up an assortment of games across Steam, GOG, Epic, Itch and more, and it can be tricky keeping track of it all. As a Windows user I highly recommend Playnite, which is a free, open-source app that tracks your games across multiple storefronts and can install and launch them without requiring any extra legwork. While a Linux version of Playnite is planned, the Heroic Games Launcher fills that void for the penguin crowd.
And that, there, is a crash course on saving big bucks when shopping for PC games. As for how to keep on top of an ever-growing backlog of bundles and impulse buys? We’re still figuring that part out.
Steam Hype is the latest site in the Hookshot network, joining Nintendo Life, Push Square, Pure Xbox and the retro-centric Time Extension to cover all corners of the gaming universe. Hookshot is also partnered with the tech experts at Digital Foundry and is partnered commercially with IGN. As Hookshot’s dedicated PC gaming site, it’s got news of the latest releases, updates and mod drops, plus weekly roundups and a must-play monthly playlist to help you keep up with the never-ending deluge of new experiences.
