Want to experience the thrill of the Steam Summer Sale without spending any real money? The Steam Sale Simulator is here to help.
Valve knows exactly how this works. When you snag a deal during one of the big Steam Sales, you never just get the game—you usually get some kind of meta-reward on top of it. Most of the time, a progress bar fills up, and once you’ve spent enough euros, you’re rewarded with a limited-time trading card. If you want the whole set, you either have to head to the Marketplace or just shell out a lot of cash.
The purchase itself is meant to be an experience. And for many, it is. During the current 2026 Steam Summer Sale, there are hundreds of posts on Reddit—often laced with gallows humor—where people share their buying habits, their shopping carts, or just random memes. Because we all know where those impulse buys end up… on our Pile of Shame.
A user named “mike wing” recently thought: What if I just turn the Steam Summer Sale experience into its own “game”? A few coding sessions later, the Steam Sale Simulator was born.
What is the Steam Sale Simulator?
And after this purchase, all sorts of achievements pop up—extra Steam levels, trading card achievements, and so on. Mike Wing even mimics the Community Market, so you can also buy Counter-Strike cases or Dota accessories. Sometimes Gabe Newell himself even gives you a free game—for example, he just gave us Cube World.
The Steam Sale Simulator is limited to the homepage, so you can’t click on individual product pages. But hey, it’s at least enough to spend $400 in two minutes.
By the way, the community is loving this little tool. The post on X racked up nearly 30,000 likes and over 2,500 reposts in no time. People feel like their “own grandma at the casino,” but at the same time are asking for new features like a proper currency converter, since the Sale Simulator currently only supports U.S. dollars.
By the way, it would currently cost $1,385,598 to buy every game on Steam. Alternatively, you could afford a small one-bedroom apartment in Munich for that amount. The real Steam Summer Sale runs through July 9, 2026.
