In January, Valve rolled out a major overhaul to the way Steam handles game soundtracks. Previously, soundtracks were treated as DLC, which was a real hassle: They couldn’t be purchased separately from the games they belonged to, and if you wanted to download the soundtrack you’d have to install the game first.
The update in early January changed all that by adding a new “soundtrack” category to Steam, enabling users to purchase, download, and manage their game music entirely independently of their games. It wasn’t perfect—existing soundtracks would have to be manually converted to the new system by developers, so some old favorites were bound to be missed—but it’s a big improvement over the old system.
To celebrate the big move, Valve kicked off a Soundtrack Sale today, with deals on a wide range of the more than 900 soundtracks currently available in the new category. There’s a lot of really good stuff marked down, but here are a few ideas to get you started.
It’s not really part of the sale, but in case you weren’t aware (as I wasn’t until I started looking into all this), soundtracks for a bunch of Valve’s games—Half-Life, Half-Life 2, HL2 Ep1, HL2 Ep2, Portal, and Portal 2—are free for the taking.
The Steam Soundtrack Sale runs until 10 am PT/1 pm ET on February 14.
