Forget Black Friday or Cyber Monday, the sale we all actually care about is nearly here. According to a list of holiday deals on Paypal, the Steam Winter Sale will supposedly be arriving next week on December 22.

This year’s sale will be a bit different than it has been in the past. Previously, Steam would offer a number of discounts for the entirety of the sale, but it would also offer even better temporary discounts for its Daily Deals or Flash Sales. For this year’s Winter Sale, however, there will be no temporary sales, so whatever a game’s price is at the start of the sale is what it will remain until the end.

In many ways, this is good for gamers, as they no longer need to follow a multi-step flowchart to decide whether or not they should by a game (flow charts like this one that I spent too much time making, which is now totally useless). It is unclear if the new sale model will result in weaker discounts overall, but at least gamers will no longer have to hold out until the end of the Steam Sale just in case the game they want gets even cheaper.

Keep an eye out for shady prices

While most developers offer amazing (or at least respectable) discounts on several of their games during the Steam Sale, there are almost always a handful of bad actors that try to take advantage of the increased visibility from the sale while also charging the most money they can.

Since developers know ahead of time when the sale will be coming, a few have previously raised their game prices immediately before the sale, making the discounts not as great as they seem to be at first glance. For example, during the recent Autumn Sale, the owner of Steam statistics site SteamSpy called out several developers on Twitter for raising their prices.

Unfortunately, shady pricing is not limited to small or unknown studios. During this year’s Summer Sale, Rockstar Games came under fire for listing Grand Theft Auto V at a 25 percent discount, when in reality the game was selling for its normal price while being bundled with an in-game currency card.

Steam owner Valve Corp even received a stern warning from a U.K. advertising regulatory body over the GTA V snafu, so it may be keeping a closer eye on the deals offered for games.

Image courtesy of Valve Corp