Steam Holiday Sale Start Date Confirmed Thanks To The Steam Awards

The Steam Awards are fully underway, as today the storefront started revealing the nominees for each category. One category will be unveiled each day until Dec. 19, at which point the voting process begins.

When that starts, so does the Steam Holiday Sale.

As with previous years, voting for the Steam Awards can net you some holiday-themed trading cards. You can use these to craft some Steam badges and show off your holiday swag, or you could sell them to knock a few extra cents off that one game you've been eyeing all year. The choice is yours.

Voting closes on Dec. 31 at 10 a.m. Pacific / 1 p.m. Eastern. Presumably, that also marks the end of the Holiday Sale, or at least puts us on the home stretch.

The Holiday Sale isn't the only one coming to Steam soon. Thanks to Geoff Keighley and The Game Awards, Steam will have another sale going into this weekend to coincide with a groundbreaking new initiative. If you've been saving your money until now, this month should make all that patience worth it.

Today marks the first category nominee reveal for the Steam Awards, which is the Outstanding Visual Style award. These games aren't the ones that go for a true-to-life aesthetic; instead, there's something surreal and beautiful about them that makes them, well, stand out. Hence the "outstanding" in the award title. The nominees for this award are Astroneer, Total War: Three Kingdoms, GRIS, Katana Zero, and Subnautica: Below Zero.

As Steam announces more award categories, you can keep up with them on the official 2019 Steam Awards page.