Valve is famous for having elaborate meta alternate reality games during their Steam sales, that keep the community engaged, and add a layer of interactivity to the sale beyond just purchasing products. But this year’s Steam sale hasn’t had anything like it- it’s been a quiet sale, with no daily deals, no flash deals, and just basic trading cards and a comic.
But it appears there was more to the sale than met the eye, at least at first- Steam users have found a series of mysterious clues. People on the Steam Sale Detectives subreddit have found a hidden password prompt embedded into every store page. If you go to the store page of any game, type “search” and press Enter, a password prompt appears in the middle of the screen.
If you enter the code that was shown on the front page of the Winter Sale comic as a barcode, you get through to a link to a sound file, which says: ‘I was on the right track. I could feel it. Tomorrow, I was going to search again.’
Is this an ARG hinting at the reveal of something else- or is this just a cute easter egg? We have just a few days left to the end of the sale, so if we want to get down to the bottom of this, there is not a whole lot of time left.