Steam's Monster Summer Sale kicked off a few hours ago and will run all the way until Sunday 21st June. A quick glance at the Steam Store homepage reveals that there are many games on offer with savings of 75 per cent and more.
Top sellers at the time of writing include the likes of Metro Redux at £6.79 (80 per cent off), Homeworld Remastered Collection at £10.79 (60 per cent off) and GTA V with a cash card included for £38.98 (25 per cent off). Seasoned Steam Sale veterans will often wait for extra discounts to be applied to their targeted titles via the daily and flash sale events. At the moment, and for the next seven hours, that includes games such as Mirror's Edge at £2.19, Papers Please at £2.09 and Halo Spartan Assault at £1.35.
In a new twist this year, Valve has implemented a minigame system to unlock additional games. The Monster Summer Game allows the Steam community to work together to unlock daily sales by completing game milestones set the day before. The unlocked daily sales will run for 48 hours each.
Looking at the minigame stats there were 1,974,937 people playing and 1,900 games in progress at the time of writing. The community has unlocked 8 out of 9 milestones set for today with seven hours remaining before the game restarts, so it looks likely that all nine sale bonuses will be unlocked. The bonuses today include extra discounts on Crysis 2, Outcast, Ancient Space and more that will come into effect, as inferred, seven hours from now.
The sale has had a couple of hiccups so far. A technical hiccup reported by Kotaku is that Valve's servers were simply overwhelmed by the amount of minigame participants as the sale kicked off. A second Steam Monster Sale issue, picked up in comments on many sites, is that Rockstar apparently raised the price of GTA V a couple of days ahead of the sale so it could cut it for the sale. It's oddly on sale now at £39.98 both with and without a $1,250,000 Great White Shark Cash Card bundled in, as you can see above.