The Steam Winter sale is live once again, and this time Valve is trying something else to get people to log in an check it every day. No, there isn’t another mini game like the one during the Summer sale. Instead, a comic titled North Pole Noir is being posted one page at a time. Additionally, there is a Steam Winter Sale badge to be crafted.
Like the Steam Halloween Sale, the Winter Sale does away with daily and flash deals. It is sad to see these go, but it is an understandable move considering that Valve hasn’t found a way to make them work with the new refund mechanism. We will take refunds over temporarily cheap games any time. Replacing the deals are the Featured Games tiles, which highlight games that Steam thinks are worth looking at. It rarely goes to the less popular games, but is something to look at nonetheless.
Fortunately, we have the opportunity to earn Winter Sale trading cards yet again. This time they are tied to the Steam Discovery Queue, and users will have the opportunity to earn up to three cards a day simply by scrolling through the queue. Not everyone crafts the badges (although at this point we’re not sure if there is a badge), but there is always the option of selling the cards on the community market for a little extra money to buy more games.
Finally, there is the North Pole Noir comic running throughout the sale. It’s being done in the style of a webcomic, with new pages being released every day. We’re not entirely sure what it’s about yet, but thus far it involves a murder (like any good film noir detective story), a gingerbread man and the North Pole. There’s nothing else to the comic, but it does provide a little extra incentive to log in and find out what happens next.
The Steam Winter Sale runs from today until 4 January 2016.
