I know this may seem like a stupid question to a lot of you but I have never been a “PC Gamer” up until I purchased the deck.
Basically what I’m asking is if I see something at an insane price, should I go ahead and jump on it or am I safe to wait until the winter sale?
Use a site like isthereanydeal.com. That one in particular only lists legitimate resellers (no shady keyshops), and you can often find even better deals than on Steam or Epic, etc. It will also show you historical prices, so you can see how low the current sale is to the lowest the price has ever been. If it’s a historic low, you can be pretty sure it’s a good time to buy, though it can always end up cheaper as time goes on.
there are also browser extensions, one I use is augmented steam and it just inserts the deal and historical deal info inline with the store page, they scrape their info from isthereanydeal.com instead of steamdb. they have graphs you can compare price trends and see if it typically goes on sale during seasonal events or conventions/expos
some publishers also have a lower limit on their deals too, one notable is koei tecmo and the atelier series as they almost never fall below $20 even with displayed deep discounts like 60%.
My rule is unless its a historical low price, it can wait
The problem is that the sales are often quite good, and you wind up buying tons of games you never play.