The weekend’s best deals: Steam Summer Sale, Apple Back to School promo, and more

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It's the weekend, which means the time has come for another Dealmaster. Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web is particularly heavy on video games, as Steam's annual Summer Sale kicked off earlier this week. The PC gaming storefront's latest mega-sale runs until July 7 and, as is often the case, includes thousands of discounts on games that span across genres and eras.

There's a good chance you're already sitting on an unwieldy backlog of games you've picked up from past sales, but if you're still looking for something new to play, we've dug through the avalanche of offers to curate a list of the best genuine discounts we think the Summer Sale is running. We've laid out more than 60 deals on Ars favorites below, and while not every pick is at the absolute lowest price we've tracked, all of them are going for notably less than the street prices we've seen from the major storefronts over the past several months. (And for any games not on our list, price-tracking tools like IsThereAnyDeal are useful for ensuring that the "bargain" you're eyeing is actually a bargain.) If you prefer not to use Steam, we've also noted other PC game stores where these prices are available.

The highlights include past Ars Game of the Year winners like Hades (down to $15), Celeste ($5), and Psychonauts 2 ($30), plus well-reviewed 2022 games like the meta comedy The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe ($17) and the breezy LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga ($37). Many of the lesser-publicized gems we've highlighted during past Summer Sales are deeply discounted once again, while bigger-name hits like the co-op adventure It Takes Two ($16) and the tense VR shooter Half-Life Alyx ($30) are back down to the best prices we've seen on PC. Steam sales are often a good time to grab some older titles that still hold up as well, and this time, classics like the roguelite Spelunky ($1.49), the co-op puzzler Portal 2 ($2), and the bonkers hack-and-slasher Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance ($7), among others, are all down to single-digit prices. Valve has a bundle that includes more than 20 of its own hits available for $13, too.

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