The dates for Steam's next two big sales have been leaked to the net, along with some other details regarding sales.
The Autumn Sale will run a full week and will kick off the end of next week on November 25th, while the big Winter Holiday Sale for Christmas will last for two weeks and will launch on December 22nd before it finishes next year on January 4th 2016.
The bigger news though is that it seems that the Flash and Daily Sales will not be returning for these sales, throwing it up into the air how big the discounts on games will actually be this time around.
"In past sale events, we’ve asked for two discounts—a duration discount that runs for the length of the sale, and a feature discount that runs in the event that a game is featured on the front page. This year, to optimize the sale for customers and to allow us to feature and recommend your products in more ways to more customers, we’re asking for just one discount, to run the length of the sale."
The information, taken from a Steamworks developer group post, says that games will still be featured on the front page of Steam for around 24-48 hours; only the discounts on the games will stay consistent throughout the sale time period.
The waiting around for the big discounts on games that you get from Flash and Daily Sales is one of the defining features of the Steam sales I feel, and also makes me wonder if because they're being discontinued that the discounts that are first applied will be that bit more than the usual 10-50% off or if the discounts originally applied will not actually be budging. It does mean you no longer have to watch for that game you really want going on sale, but adding it to your Wishlist usually helped with that quite a bit.
We'll know soon though with the Autumn Sale just around the corner.