Surprise! Steam's Lunar New Year Sale is back

Just in case your massive backlog of games isn't quite massive enough, Steam's 2024 Lunar New Year Sale is here to help you bulk it up a little bit more. You might recall that in 2022, Valve announced that it was replacing its annual Lunar New Year Sale with a Spring Sale, giving it a big annual sale for each of the four seasons. Then in 2023 it surprised us all with a Chinese New Year Sale, and now it's 2024 and-surprise again!-the Lunar New Year event is back in business. As always, the Steam Lunar New Year Sale features discounts on a range of games, with a focus on studios based in China-in fact, it's "Hosted by Steam China," according to the sale banner, that being the limited version of Steam that's legally available to people living in mainland China. Valve didn't say why it's brought the Lunar New Year Sale back just a couple years after pulling the plug on it, but I'd wager it has something to do with the explosive growth of Steam in China. The Steam Hardware and Software Survey indicates that Simplified Chinese is one of the dominant languages used on the storefront, and while those results aren't scientifically precise-in October 2023 Simplified Chinese was the language of choice of nearly 46% of Steam users, while English accounted for just 26.4%, and that seems like the kind of variance that raises questions about methodology-there's no doubt that people whose primary language is Chinese make up a huge portion of Steam's user base. Steam's 2024 Lunar New Year Sale is live now and runs until February 15.