Steam is replacing its hand-picked sale calendar with personal recommendations

Valve will stop hand-scheduling the Discounts & Events section next year and show each player their own picks. Early numbers from a niche publisher are striking; players have doubts.

AI-drafted from 2 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

Valve is ending the hand-built calendar behind Steam's Discounts & Events section. Instead of Valve staff, or developers through Steamworks, scheduling which games rotate through it, each player will see a selection picked for them. Valve announced the change on 29 September and expects to drop the hand-built calendar entirely at some point next year, Game Developer reports.

It is about what you are shown, not what you pay. As GamingOnLinux points out, this is not dynamic pricing. Two players opening the same tab on the same day will simply see different games.

Ten times more games a day

Valve says it has been testing this quietly for months. “Our goal with Steam's discovery features is to show the right game to the right customer,” its announcement reads, and swapping some hand-picked spots for personalised ones let the section show “10x more games to customers in a given day”, with what Valve calls “meaningful increases in store page visits, wishlists, and cart additions.”

New hand-picked placements are paused, though developers who already have a slot booked keep it. Valve promises new tools for managing discounts and sale events, and frames the whole change as freeing developers from having to “spend time trying to convince someone at Valve to feature their products.” Exact timing is due in the coming weeks.

One publisher's before and after

The most concrete evidence so far comes from Tim Bender, chief executive of the publisher Hooded Horse. Game Developer reports that he shared figures for one unnamed game: more than 7,000 visits from the Discounts & Events page in a single month, against 7,355 across the previous six months, which leaves 14 visits for the five months before that. “This change took a source of traffic that was non-existent for niche indies, and suddenly made it the best source of traffic in the entire store,” he wrote. GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless, who spotted the test in September, called it “a good move to help the little guys, done quietly.”

Why some players are wary

Not everyone in the GamingOnLinux comments is convinced. One reader argues that some of the best games they have played came from people with different tastes, which an algorithm built on your own history is unlikely to reproduce. Another worries that a game with fewer than ten reviews gives the system little reason to expect a sale, while a big release people buy regardless of genre is a safe bet, so the small fish could end up just as invisible as before. A third reader makes the opposite case: under the current system games get only a couple of guaranteed feature slots in their whole lifetime, and everything else depends on Valve's choices.

Both sides can be right. The Hooded Horse figures suggest personalisation can find buyers for a niche game that a single shared front page never would. Whether it keeps doing that once every studio on Steam is tuning its discounts for the algorithm is something Valve's promised tools, and next year's sales, will show.

What changes for developers now

For anyone planning a sale this winter, the practical point is the pause: there are no new featured slots to apply for. A discount still matters, but whether a player sees it now depends on whether Steam thinks that player will care, and not on a date someone at Valve put in a calendar.

Sources

• Steam's discounts and events tab will soon be fully algorithm-driven (Game Developer)
• Here comes the algorithm - Valve updating Steam to show different games for discounts and events (GamingOnLinux)

Image: Illustration: AI-generated for Gaming World