The Best Early Prime Day PC Gaming Deals

Are you ready for Amazon’s Prime Big Deal days to kick off tomorrow (October 8)? The massive sale will bring us deep discounts on all manner of hardware and software, and we’re frothing at the mouth to find the absolute best offers for you. We’re so excited, in fact, that we jumped in the pool a little early and found you a quintet of awesome price drops on PC gaming stuff. We’ve got deeply discounted games, peripherals, and even PCs ready to shop right now, and we’ll update when the sale officially starts.

We gave an Editors’ Choice award to the Razer BlackShark V2 in our review, saying that it “offers excellent audio and microphone quality, loads of software features and options, and a light, comfortable fit.” While it is a wired headset, that constant physical connectivity gives you better audio quality that’s not dependent on Bluetooth signal strength. The headset is surprisingly lightweight, with comfortable oval ear shells that are fully enclosed for advanced passive noise cancellation. The hyperclear cardioid microphone will keep you communicating with your squad, and the three-stage titanium speaker drivers produce exceptionally clear sound.

There are still some genres that PCs handle better than consoles, and one of the most notable is 4X strategy. Spanning epic sessions of world conquest, they just don’t work as well without a keyboard and a mouse. You can’t talk strategy without talking Civilization, and the sixth installment of the game, which originally released in 2016, is now available along with all the DLC and expansions for a seriously low price. We previewed the game and raved about it, and it’s only gotten better with age. If you need a new time sink, this is the one.

Gaming laptops come in a wide swath of price brackets, and finding the ideal balance between cost and performance is a tricky task. That’s one reason we try to review and analyze as many as we can, so you’ll have a little more information before you spend that cash. We recently reviewed the Acer Nitro V, a budget to midrange 16″ portable, and said it “delivers surprisingly steady 1080p gaming performance for the price,” thanks to an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS eight-core processor, GeForce RTX 4060 laptop GPU, 16GB of DDR5 RAM and a 1TB SSD. It benchmarked well and getting 15% off the list price makes it a sweet deal.

Marvel’s Midnight Suns

Guide the universe’s darkest heroes through an excellent adventure

$20.00
at Amazon

$79.99
Save $59.99

Even though the Avengers game turned out to be a disappointment, Marvel fans have been eating good otherwise. One of the better superhero titles we’ve seen recently is Firaxis’s tactical title Midnight Suns. Starring a cohort of the company’s gritter characters like Wolverine, Ghost Rider and Blade, it has you traveling the world to prevent evil sorceress Lilith’s plan for total occult domination. We reviewed the Xbox version and said that it was “an epic comic book adventure with dynamic and inventive strategy mechanics paired with engrossing superhero socializing.”

At list price, this definitely seems like a big investment, but taking $90 off makes it a lot more viable. Logitech makes consistently excellent mechanical gaming keyboards, with GL Tactile switches that give just the right amount of feedback with each keypress. It’s a breeze to open it up and swap out switches and caps, and the aircraft-grade aluminum alloy chassis will survive intense sessions. Thirty hours of battery life keeps you going as long as you need to. See how it stacks up on our list of the best gaming keyboards.

Need to save even more? Check out our deals page.

What to Expect During Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days Event

About K. Thor Jensen

Contributing Writer

K. Thor Jensen is a writer and cartoonist living in the Pacific Northwest. He has contributed to dozens of prestigious outlets, including PCMag, Tested, Clickhole, and Newsweek. His second graphic novel, Cloud Stories, was released in 2017.

Read K. Thor’s full bio

Read the latest from K. Thor Jensen