• The Real-Time Strategy (RTS) Fest is the first Steam sale of 2025.
• Live now, the sale and its events last until 27th January.
• Look around and play demos to find hidden gems.

With January still not over yet another event has popped up to try and take your money, this time from the familiar folk at Valve. The first sale on Steam for 2025 is the Real-Time Strategy Fest that was just launched.

Available from now until 27th January this event, like other Steam Fests, is a combination of a sale and an invitation to try out new games through demos.

The Real-Time Strategy Fest has taken over the front page of Steam, but it has further been broken down into the following categories: Featured, Browse Games, Free To Play, VR, Free Demos, and Upcoming.

The Free Demos section is always what excites us most about Steam Fest events and the this one doesn’t let us down. There’s a wide range of interesting games with demos that caught our eye but the one that caught our eye is called Empires of the Undergrowth. Instead of controlling an army of humans, aliens or robots as with most RTS titles, Empires of the Undergrowth uses real life bugs instead.

“Command swarms of warriors at an unprecedented scale of warfare in this blend of RTS and base-building. Lead ant colonies against the many fearsome threats of the insect world, while building intricate nests, developing pheromone-based tactics, and evolving to meet growing dangers,” reads the official game description.

This idea is so good that there’s a similar title down the page called Empire of the Ants and we can’t forget that all the way back in the 90s there was the game Battle Bugs. It seems like controlling hoards of bugs is just so closely linked to the idea of an RTS that games keep popping up with this gimmick.

While we’re all for finding new games like this, we can’t help but also come back to classics like the Age of Empires titles which are all on sale. We’re particularly tempted by Age of Mythology: Retold which launched in September 2024, which is why its discount is “only” at 33 percent right now.

Lastly, as Valve has been doing for quite some time now, there’s a short trailer to accompany the announcement of this event. If any of the games used in the trailer catch your eye, you can not only see the game titles appear in the trailer itself, but if you click through to the video description you can also find direct links to the Steam pages for each game, making further reading / buying as easy as possible.