It looks like we now know when the next three Steam sales are going to land.

Kotaku reckons it garnered the information from development sources. The dates are as follows:

• Steam Halloween Sale: October 26th 2017 - November 1st 2017
• Steam Autumn Sale (over Black Friday): November 22nd 2017 - November 28th 2017
• Steam Winter Sale: December 21st 2017 - January 4th 2018

The fact that there will be Halloween, Autumn and Winter sales is no surprise, but Valve certainly would have preferred the exact time frames to have been kept secret, certainly at least until nearer the time.

Steam sales have perhaps lost a bit of their shine in recent times, owing to Valve’s decision to drop its daily and flash sales. That model saw general discounts applied across the duration of the promotion, but then additional daily deals and then surprise flash deals, all of which would occur throughout the duration of the event.

Nowadays, the same discounts that open the sales apply until the end, with the only change being which games Valve chooses to highlight on any given day. Presumably this model was adopted to appease those who previously bought a sale item only to see it discounted further in a daily or flash sale a little down the road. This problem is especially problematic in the age of Steam refunds, where any game owner for less than two weeks and played for less than two hours will be refunded upon request.

There are plenty of devs who argue that Steam sales are a fairly unhealthy part of the platform’s ecosystem, with very high numbers of users routinely placing wanted games on their wishlists and then waiting until the next sale rolls around. For some titles, the number of sales made at full price can often be very low, with consumers seeming increasingly unwilling to ever pay full price for their games.

Others, however, welcome the regularity with which their Steam sales numbers receive a healthy boost, and embrace the chance to beat key resellers on price.