It’s that time of the year again when you’re encouraged to go haywire with your Steam purchases. The Steam Autumn Sale has returned a few days before Black Friday and prices have been slashed across all of the PC titles on Valve’s store.

These deals can vary from 10 percent off to a whopping 90 percent but you better hurry – the Steam Autumn Sale concludes on November 28th. Keep a look out for the featured deals as well since there’s some pretty sweet artwork for games like Night in the Woods and The Long Dark to admire.

Along with the latest Steam Sale, Valve is also inviting users to nominate games for its Second Annual Steam Awards. Categories range from “The World Is Grim Enough Let’s Just All Get Along” Award which celebrates games without conflict to The “No Apologies” Award which is for guilty pleasure games that you still love despite their flaws. Make sure to vote for your favourite games and suggest a category as well while you’re at it.

It may have been a while since the last Steam Sale but never fear – Valve is readying some pre-Holiday cheer, if some leaked dates are to be believed. The leaks first emerged via Reddit and Eurogamer later confirmed the dates independently.

You can look forward to the Steam Halloween Sale starting on October 26th and ending on November 1st. The Steam Black Friday Sale aka the Fall Sale will begin on November 22nd and ends on November 28th. Finally, the Steam Winter Sale will begin on December 24th and end on January 4th 2018.

Remember to take these as rumours since Valve hasn’t actually confirmed the same. Then again, the Steam Sale dates are usually leaked, year in and year out, and we never really know about them until they’re live. As it stands, the dates line up with previous years’ dates so these aren’t exactly unexpected.

Keep those wishlists and wallets handy, especially given all the other top-notch releases like Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, Assassin’s Creed Origins and Super Mario Odyssey that will be releasing in the coming week.

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.

For the second time running, PayPal may have outed Valve’s plans on when the Steam Winter sale is due- you keep this up, guys, and Valve will soon stop taking you into confidence. And you don’t want that, do you?

Anyway, if you were wondering when the Steam Winter Sale starts, according to PayPal, it starts on December 18, and goes all the way through to January 2. This news comes to us courtesy of PayPal Japan, and the ever so sharp folks at Reddit, who caught the leak as it happened.

Of course, Valve’s winter (and summer) sales are always the big ones, the real shows, so I shudder to think at just how bad for my wallet and bank balance this sale might be… particularly since there are so many games on the PC that I have wanted, but not yet purchased.

Stay tuned for more.