The best deals in the 2023 Steam Summer Sale

Tyler Wilde
·10 min read
star wars jedi survivor
star wars jedi survivor

As the stars turn, so too do the deals, returning each year at their appointed time: The 2023 Steam Summer Sale hath arrivethed.

The Spring Sale a few months ago was a little early for big discounts on new 2023 releases, but with half the year gone, you'll actually find quite a few 2023 games discounted during the two-week-long Summer Sale, which ends on July 13. We've kicked off this list of recommendations with some of those new games, followed by discounts on our favorite games from last year, and then a selection of other favorites that you can grab for as little as a few bucks.

The Steam Deck is also on sale for just the second time, and at 20% off, Valve's handheld is the cheapest it's ever been.

For more recommendations, we recently compiled a list of great games that always get Steam sale discounts. If you miss this window to buy one of them, the next big seasonal Steam sale is the Autumn Sale, which starts in November.

New 2023 games on sale

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor | $52.49 / £44.99 (25% off)
Respawn did it again with some good Star Warsin' at a time when there's not a lot of good Star Warsin' outside of Andor. "Easily the best modern Star Wars game," as Morgan put it.

Roots of Pacha | $19.99 / £17.59 (20% off)
The most Stardew Valley-alike farm sim in years is a cozy adventure back to the beginning of civilization where you'll discover crops for the first time, tame livestock in the wild, and invent the miracle of irrigation.

Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun | $17.59 / £15.19 (20% off)
"Boltgun is the first truly exceptional Warhammer 40,000 game since Dawn of War 19 years ago," we wrote in our 85% review.

HROT | $16.99 / £13.16 (15% off)
We loved this oppressively grim, Quakelike spin on 1980s communist Czechoslovakia to the tune of a glowing 87% review. All the gruesome horror belies an anarchic sense of humor, with interactable toilets, trolling traps, and Soviet spacemen popping up in the strangest places of this excellent, gripping FPS.

System Shock | $31.99 / £27.99 (20% off)
Looking Glass' original System Shock could often get overlooked in favor of its famous successor, and no matter how much you love the classics, it can be hard to go back to its chunky, pre-mouselook interface and grueling, sink-or-swim exploration. Enter Nightdive's excellent remake.

Wartales | $27.99 / £23.99 (20% off)
A very PC kind of game: granular, turn-based, grim, but also a "a rich and granular mechanical toybox," as we described it in our 83% review.

Everspace 2 | $39.99 / £35.99 (20% off)
A good old fashioned singleplayer space adventure. If you remember 2003's Freelancer—a great game—this is like that, but new and even better.

Dead Space | $41.99 / £34.99 (30% off)
Everything you want to see in a remake: The new Dead Space respects what made the original great while adding enough to be worth it.

Like A Dragon: Ishin! | $42 (30% off)
The Yakuza spinoff that we never thought would get remade on PC sends Kiryu and the other series cast back to the past to cosplay Sakamoto Ryōma and co in the late Edo period.

Stranded: Alien Dawn | $27.99 (20% off)
An engrossing survival colony builder with a lot of interesting scenarios, including one that lets you (eventually) rescue your survivors into orbit and one where you can amass enough wealth through trading to buy the entire planet you're stuck on.

Wo Long Fallen Dynasty | $44.99 / £41.24 (25% off)
We loved the latest Team Ninja action RPG, awarding it an 89% in spite of some rocky PC performance issues. Its momentum-driven combat system is a bit more Sekiro and a bit less Souls or Nioh, with a setting that pulls from Chinese mythology. Multiple patches since release have improved performance.

Pizza Tower | $14.99 / £41.24 (25% off)
One of our favorite games of the year, seriously. It's a "non-stop, absurd, and wonderful slice of speedrunning action," we said in our 90% review.

Our 2022 GOTYs on sale

Elden Ring | $41.99 / £34.99 (30% off)
🏆 PC Gamer's 2022 Game of the Year
This is only the second time Elden Ring's gone on sale since launch, so it's a good chance to snap up our 2022 Game of the Year if you missed it in the Winter Sale. We don't know when the expansion will be out, but we've already speculated about what it might contain.

Marvel's Midnight Suns | $23.99 / £19.99 (60% off)
🏆 2022 GOTY Runner-Up
XCOM-maker Firaxis created our favorite recent superhero game, a mix of XCOM's gridded turn-based tactics, deck building, and friendship sim. It was definitely underloved, and is worth picking up on sale.

Total War: Warhammer 3 | $40.19 / £33.49 (33% off)
🏆 Best Strategy Game 2022
A good discount on 2022's best strategy game. Pretty swell. And to play the Immortal Empires sandbox mega-campaign, you no longer need to own both the previous entries.

Strange Horticulture | $9.74 / £8.31 (35% off)
🏆 Best Puzzle Game 2022
Inheriting a plant shop where nothing is labeled sounds stressful, but it's actually a wonderful combination of cozy and spooky thanks to fascinatingly odd customers, and a cat you can pet. We named Strange Horticulture 2022's best puzzle game, and this is a sweet price for the year's best anything.

Vampire Survivors | $3.99 / £3.19 (20% off)
🏆 Best Roguelike 2022
Earlier in 2022, we called Vampire Survivors "one of the best deals you can get on PC" at its full price: $4.99. Now it's on sale again for just $3.99. A bullet-heavenly bargain.

Teardown | $15.99 / £14.79 (20% off)
🏆 Best Sandbox 2022
A physics-based, voxel-powered playground melded with a genius puzzle game: "If I blow up this entire mansion, will I have space to drive this sportscar into the ocean?"

More 2022 award winners:

Steam Summer Sale: Under $20

Risk of Rain 2 | $12.49 / £9.99 (50% off)
An excellent roguelike about fighting hordes of monsters while collecting and combining items to generate increasingly absurd effects. A PC Gamer favorite.

Resident Evil Village| $19.99 / £16.49 (50% off)
The Resident Evil remakes are all the rage right now, but 2021's RE Village is worth circling back for if you missed it. We called it "the scariest Resident Evil yet" at the time. Plus, it features the tall woman of so many memes.

Pentiment | $13.39 / £10.04 (33% off)
Obsidian went in a surprising direction for this 2022 gem: Instead of the usual sci-fi or fantasy RPG, it's a narrative-focused game set in the 16th century, and it's great.

Battlefield 2042 | $14.99 / £12.49 (75% off)
It got a bad rap when it launched, but the latest Battlefield game is a lot of fun, in part thanks to its many patches and revisions and the Portal custom server mode.

V Rising | $15.99 / £12.39 (20% off)
One of our favorite recent survival games, V Rising casts you as a vampire and tasks you with raising your own castle.

Hunt: Showdown | $15.99 / £14.39 (60% off)
Here's Hunt at its lowest price (matching the winter sale). It's still the most interesting FPS in gaming right now. Other extraction shooters (and other shooters in general) should take note.

Zero Escape: The Nonary Games | $11.99 / £9.51 (60% off)
One of PC Gamer's, and a lot of other people's, all-time favorite visual novels. A very nice kind of game to play in a hammock on a Steam Deck.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt | $11.99 / £7.49 (70% off)
The big ray tracing update to The Witcher 3 has a bit of a rocky rollout, but it's getting better with patches. The grass shadows are good again now, for instance.

Steam Summer Sale: Under $10

Wasteland 3| $7.99 / £6.19 (80% off)
How does partying up with "a goat, a swearing parrot, a cyborg chicken, and a cat who wears a little military hat" sound? If good, then this post-apocalyptic CRPG from InXile may be worth the mere eight bucks it'll cost you.

Halo: The Master Chief Collection| $9.99 / £7.49 (75% off)
The big box of Halo is at a new low price as part of this sale. The Master Chief Collection includes every Halo up to Halo 4, including Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, and Halo 2: Anniversary.

Pillars of Eternity | $7.49 / £5.74 (75% off)
One of our all-time favorite RPGs is available for next to nothing. Obsidian brought all of its skills at making inventive, detailed worlds and funneled into a new fantasy game with loads to love.

Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire | $9.99 / £7.49 (75% off)
Pillars of Eternity 2 is another great choice if you want to dig into a massive, fantasy world and see what kind of stuff you can get up to. (Also, the upcoming Avowed takes place in this world.)

Sunless Skies | $9.99 / £7.59 (60% off)
A PC Gamer favorite—we're suckers for grim, wordy adventures—Sunless Skies puts you in charge of a steam locomotive... in spaaaace. It's good roleplaying fun, with some of the sharpest videogame writing you'll find.

Steam Summer Sale: Under $5

The Talos Principle | $4.49 / £3.74 (85% off)
One of the better puzzle games of the past 10 years—and from Croteam of all developers—can be yours for less than $5. Notable especially because there's a sequel coming soon.

Loop Hero | $4.94 / £4.22 (67% off)
The Vampire Survivors of 2021, in the sense that it's an inexpensive game that it's easy to devote way more time to than you ever thought you would.

Metro 2033 Redux | $3.99 / £2.99 (80% off)
One of the all-time best singleplayer shooters by a lot of measures. The original released in 2010, while the Redux version bumped it up to 4A's latest engine tech in 2014. A damn good FPS for $4.

Ikaruga | $4.99 / £3.49 (50% off)
We don't talk about bullet hell games too often, so when we noticed that one of the best to ever release on PC was on sale for $5, we felt compelled to mention it again. It's hard, but compared to some other shmups out there Ikaruga is actually kinda chill.

Steam Summer Sale: 10 years of Game of the Year winners

You can get 10 years' worth of the best in PC gaming (according to us) for a little over $150 during the Steam Summer Sale. Just one of our last 10 GOTY winners, MGS5, isn't on sale right now. Read about why these games are so special in our Game of the Year awards archive.