The $5.99 Game That Won Steam’s 2026 Summer Sale

The Steam Summer Sale 2026 ran June 25 to July 9, a 14-day cut Valve had already put on a public calendar in January. It opened at 10 AM Pacific and closed at the same hour two weeks later.

The store filled with catalog discounts as deep as 90%, and a $5.99 hide-and-seek game that was not on sale still led the best-seller list.

The Two-Week Window Valve Locked In January

On January 15, 2026, Steamworks Development posted its second-half 2026 events calendar and listed the summer sale as a seasonal event for June 25 to July 9. That window held. Steam News opened the storewide event on June 25 and told shoppers it ran through July 9 at 10 a.m. Pacific, calling it a long one.

The 2025 summer sale had run June 26 to July 10, so 2026 simply slid one day earlier and kept the two-week length. Spring 2026 was already done by then, a seven-day sale from March 19 to March 26. Summer is the long seasonal cut. Autumn and winter are the other two, and they are not the same length.

SteamDB’s Summer Sale 2026 record logged the same June 25 start the day before it went live. Prices locked on day one and did not rotate through flash deals, so the first look at a wishlist was the look that lasted until July 9.

What Time Did the Summer Sale Start?

The sale started at 10 AM Pacific on June 25, 2026, which is 5 PM UTC, and it ended at that same Pacific hour on July 9. Anyone who had already built a wishlist got a ping when those titles dropped, which is still the practical way to shop a two-week storewide event.

START TIMES BY REGION

Players who saved the June 25 to July 9 dates got the window they were promised, down to the 10 AM Pacific close. The end times matched the table above, two weeks later.

A $6 Game Beat the Discounted Catalog

Meccha Chameleon is a multiplayer hide-and-seek game from Japanese makers lemorion_1224 and Haganeiro, a two-person team. Players paint blank bodies to blend into a map while seekers hunt them. It launched on Steam on June 10 at $5.99 and never needed a summer markdown.

On June 25, the day the sale opened, the team posted that the game had hit 10 million sales, 16 days after launch.

We hit 10 million sales! Thank you so much for your support!

lemorion_1224 and Haganeiro, Meccha Chameleon, Steam news post, June 25, 2026

They posted again on July 5, still inside the sale window: 15 million copies. Steam charts during those two weeks put the $5.99 game above Cyberpunk 2077 at $17.99, Baldur’s Gate 3 at $44.99, and a stack of other catalog heavyweights. Peak players sat above 340,000 at once.

Haganeiro had said in a June 17 post that the pair spent nothing on ads. The hook is cheap, easy to stream, and built for short chaotic sessions, which is a bad matchup for a $60 sequel sitting at 25% off. On July 5 they were already teasing a collaboration map; the HIKAKIN Museum later landed as a free addition after the sale closed.

The 90% Haul and the Unplayed Pile

The rest of the store did what a summer sale is built to do. Older single-player games fell to a few dollars. Last year’s full-price hits took their first real cut. A handful of 2026 releases barely moved.

NOTABLE SUMMER SALE PRICES

A basket of five older games could be had for a little more than $20 if you stayed in the deep-discount row. That is the part of the sale that still feels like a raid. It is also the part that turns into a backlog.

The summer event still trains people to buy more copies than they will play, especially when the cut is 90%. In early September, buyers were still opening June receipts, launching Mega Man Battle Network for the first time, or leaving a Hotline Miami copy untouched. The 90% catalog won the cart. It did not win the next two months of free evenings.

Steam Deck shoppers got the same two weeks, with Verified lists full of sub-$5 and sub-$10 games. New 2026 releases mostly sat at 10% to 25% if they discounted at all. The money in the cart skewed old, cheap, and unfinished.

Trading Cards Returned Without Mysterious Drops

Valve did run a sale-period card set, which had been an open question in early June. The 2026 summer set had 10 cards. The old pre-sale “mysterious” drops, in use since 2014, were retired this year, so there was no week of unmarked cards converting at the start.

HOW THE 2026 SALE CARDS DROPPED

• The set: 10 cards, with foil versions, plus emoticons, backgrounds, and a craftable summer badge.
• Badge crafts: Crafting any other badge during the sale also granted a random summer card on top of the usual rewards.
• Store spend: Every $10 spent on the Steam store dropped a random card from the set.
• The cutoff: All Summer Sale 2026 cards expired on August 10, 2026, at 9 AM PST.

Artwork leaned coastal: Beach Waves, Fishing Fowl, Crabby Catch, Deep Diver, Silver Tide. The market always floods when everyone crafts at once, so card prices sag during the event and firm up after the set dies. This year that death date was mid-August, not a mystery.

When Does the Steam Autumn Sale Start?

The Steam Autumn Sale 2026 runs October 1 to October 8, a seven-day seasonal event Valve put on the same January calendar as summer. It is shorter than summer’s 14 days and much shorter than winter. The next storewide hunt after July 9 is that first week of October, not late November.

Valve moved autumn forward in 2025, when it ran September 29 to October 6 instead of Thanksgiving week. 2026 keeps that early-October slot. Black Friday still gets a Special Offers hub later in November, with dates Valve said it would fill in closer to the week.

THE REST OF VALVE’S 2026 CALENDAR

1. September 10 to September 14: Programming Fest, already open as of September 10.
2. September 14 to September 21: Party Based RPG Fest.
3. October 1 to October 8: Steam Autumn Sale, the next seasonal event.
4. October 12 to October 19: Cooking Fest.
5. October 19 to October 26: Steam Next Fest, October edition.
6. October 26 to November 2: Steam Scream Fest V.
7. November 16 to November 23: Auto-Battler RPG Fest, then a Black Friday hub later in the month.
8. December 17, 2026 to January 4, 2027: Steam Winter Sale, 18 days, the last seasonal event of the year.

Summer is still the big two-week dump. Autumn is a week for first cuts on games that launched after March. Winter is the long holiday sit. If a wishlist title missed June, October 1 is the next realistic shot at a storewide price, and December 17 is the one after that.

Steam Was Already at $15 Billion

Rhys Elliott of Alinea Analytics put Steam at $15 billion in gross revenue through the first eight months of 2026, about 15% above the same stretch of 2025. The summer sale sits inside that year, not on top of it.

STEAM IN 2026 SO FAR

• Platform take: $15 billion gross in the first eight months, per Elliott at Alinea Analytics.
• Top new 2026 game: Forza Horizon 6 at $210.5 million, then Crimson Desert at $203.3 million and Resident Evil Requiem at $200.9 million.
• The $5.99 outlier: Meccha Chameleon at $89.8 million, which matches 15 million copies at $5.99.
• How concentrated: Those six new games, also including Slay the Spire 2 at $148.4 million and Subnautica 2 at $139.2 million, sum to $992.1 million, 6.6% of the $15 billion. Alinea’s top 100 new 2026 games are $2.4 billion, 15.9% of the year so far.

Only two of those six top new earners are new IPs, Crimson Desert and Meccha Chameleon. The summer sale did not have to mint that year. It had to move the catalog and, for two weeks, it still lost the best-seller strip to a full-price $5.99 game.

The Steam Summer Sale 2026 did what the January calendar said it would do, then closed on July 9. The Autumn Sale opens October 1. The Winter Sale follows on December 17.