Surprise! Steam’s Lunar New Year Sale is back
Just in case your massive backlog of games isn’t quite massive enough, Steam’s 2024 Lunar New Year Sale is here to help you bulk it up a little bit more.
You might recall that in 2022, Valve announced that it was replacing its annual Lunar New Year Sale with a Spring Sale, giving it a big annual sale for each of the four seasons. But then in 2023 it surprised us all with a Chinese New Year Sale, and now it’s 2024 and—surprise again!—the Lunar New Year event is back in business.
As always, the Steam Lunar New Year Sale features discounts on a range of games, with a focus on studios based in China—in fact, it’s “hosted by Steam China,” according to the sale banner, that being the limited version of Steam that’s legally available to people living in mainland China.
It’s not the biggest of the multitudinous parade of Steam sales that passes our way each year, but here are a few games I think look interesting (and are well-rated by users):
And yes, there are daily rewards as well—like this cute little baby dragon sticker. (I think it’s a baby dragon, anyway.)
Valve didn’t say why it’s brought the Lunar New Year Sale back just a couple years after pulling the plug on it, but I’d wager it has something to do with the explosive growth of Steam in China. The Steam Hardware and Software Survey indicates that Simplified Chinese is one of the dominant languages used on the storefront (and has been for some time), and while those results aren’t scientifically precise—in October 2023, for instance, Simplified Chinese was the language of choice of nearly 46% of Steam users, while English accounted for just 26.4%, and that seems like the kind of variance that raises questions about methodology—there’s no doubt that people whose primary language is Chinese make up a huge portion of Steam’s user base.
Steam’s download stats page reinforces the scale of the Chinese market, revealing that China accounts for 28% of Steam’s global traffic—more than a quarter of the world’s usage concentrated in one single country. The US, by comparison, sucks up 18.7% of Steam traffic.
Steam’s 2024 Lunar New Year Sale is live now and runs until February 15. The big Steam Spring Sale will follow in just over a month, on March 14.
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