Steam Autumn Sale now live, but you don't have long

As expected, the Steam Autumn Sale has officially gone live ahead of Thanksgiving and Black Friday. To many, this is something of a precursor to the larger Steam Winter Sale that will kick off next month around Christmas Day, but there's still plenty of reason to have a look at the deals that are on offer during the Autumn Sale.

For starters, the discounts you'll find are usually just as good as the ones that are available during the Winter Sale. There's also the fact that Steam has opened up nominations for The Steam Awards during the Autumn Sale. Voting won't happen until the Winter Sale begins next month, but for now, Steam users are able to nominate games for 10 different award categories.

The award categories for 2020 include Game of the Year (obviously), VR Game of the Year, Labor of Love, Better with Friends, Outstanding Visual Style, Most Innovative Gameplay, Best Game You Suck At, Best Soundtrack, Outstanding Story-Rich Game, and finally, Sit Back and Relax. Users will need to select games that were released in 2020 for all categories except for the Labor of Love award, as that award goes to titles that are still receiving new content and updates long after their debut. In fact, the older the game is, the stronger its qualifications for that award are, technically speaking.

Players can also level up the Steam Awards Nomination Committee badge by completing four different tasks associating with the Steam Awards. Those tasks include nominating at least one game, nominating a game in each category, playing a game you've nominating, and either posting a new review or updating an existing review for one of the games you've nominated.

Aside from the Steam Awards business, we've all been through the Steam sale song and dance before – all of the discounts you see will be available throughout the duration of the sale, though the lineup of highlighted deals on the front page will rotate out each day. The Steam Autumn Sale runs until December 1st at 10AM PST, which means you've got six days to make any purchases you're thinking about before these deals go away.