Andy Garcia · freelance dev
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Games & Steam

Steam Is Retiring Hand-Picked Deals After Tests Showed 10x More Games. The Old Slots Favored Hits.

October 19, 2026 8 min read

On Tuesday, September 29, Valve posted "Upcoming Changes to the Discounts & Events Section on Steam" on its Steamworks developer blog. The section that carries sales on the Steam homepage will move "away from a manual calendar-based approach and into something more dynamic and personalized for each customer." Valve has already paused scheduling new curated placements there: Weekend Deals, Midweek Deals and Daily Deals. Slots already on the calendar will be honored. Valve expects to "fully cease using a curated calendar" for the section sometime early next year, so early 2027, and promises "new and updated tools" to manage discounts and sale events.

The reason it gives is a test. Over "the last few months," Valve replaced some curated spots with personalized recommendations and was able to "show 10x more games to customers in a given day in that section," with "meaningful increases in store page visits, wishlists, and cart additions."

My strategy game, Doomsday: M.A.D., is on its way to Steam, so I did not read this as a story about algorithms in general. I read the documentation page Valve links at the bottom of its post. The link points to a section called "Curated," and that section says plainly who the old slots were for.

Who the curated calendar was for

As I read it on October 19, Valve's discount documentation says this about curated slots: "While there aren't exact rules, as a base guideline we tend to focus on the most-played or best-selling games on Steam." The slots "aren't negotiated for or sold, they're just built around player data." Valve invites you to get in touch "if your game has lots of happy customers and hundreds of thousands of revenue over past few months." And curated slots are "generally restricted to once a calendar year, with at least three months' gap between promotions."

Then the capacity. The same page lists two or more Daily Deal slots per day, up to six Midweek Deal slots per week and up to six Weekend Deal slots per week. At two Daily Deals a day and the full six of each of the others, that is 14 + 6 + 6 = 26 headline slots a week, or about 1,350 a year: an order of magnitude, not a count.

SteamDB counts 21,244 games released on Steam in 2025, and 121,919 released in total by the end of that year. If every one of those slots had gone to a different 2025 release, about 6 percent of them would have had one. The guideline points the slots elsewhere: at the most-played or best-selling games of the whole catalogue. In a LinkedIn post in September, Hooded Horse CEO Tim Bender wrote that the section "used to be heavily weighted to the best-selling games."

So the curated calendar was already built on data, but on aggregate data: the biggest games, a few at a time. What Valve is changing is the unit. The old question was which games deserve the next two dozen or so slots. The new one is which discounted games fit this customer. A small game with few players rarely won the first contest. Once it is on discount, it can enter the second.

What the numbers do and do not say

Valve gives a multiplier and an adjective. Ten times more games shown per day in the section, "meaningful" increases in visits, wishlists and cart additions. No baseline, no absolute numbers, nothing broken down by the size of the game. Valve also writes that it does not "believe this will be perfect right away."

The only game-level numbers in the coverage come from one publisher. Earlier in September, GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless wrote in his newsletter that Valve had made the featured games in the section (the non-Daily Deal ones) more personalized, and called it "a good move to help the little guys, done quietly." Picking up on it, Bender posted screenshots for one unnamed indie game on LinkedIn: 7,341 visits from the Discounts & Events grid in the last month, against 7,355 over the last six months. "So only 14 visits from the prior 5 months," he wrote. His summary: "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." For two of Hooded Horse's slightly larger games, he wrote, the change was "softer": one had 14k visits from that placement in the last month against 6k over the prior five months, the other 16k against 35k.

That is a handful of games, from one publisher, shown in screenshots. A strong signal, not a benchmark.

PC Gamer's Andy Chalk cleared up an early confusion: what goes dynamic is the recommendations, not the prices. Nothing in Valve's post is about dynamic pricing. He also raised a fair worry, that players may miss games "outside their usual areas of interest." For a developer, that worry has a flip side. A personalized system can only place a game it knows how to describe.

The rules that still apply

The calendar is going. Valve announced new tools, not new discount rules, and on October 19 its documentation still listed these.

A custom discount runs from 1 to 14 days, at 10 to 95 percent. Discounts must be at least 30 days apart, counted from the end of one to the start of the next, and the only exemption is the four seasonal sales. A 14-day discount plus its cooldown is a 44-day cycle: about eight custom discounts a year at most, plus the seasonal sales. When placement is decided per customer, each of those eight is a moment the system can show your game to someone. Each one deserves a plan.

Two thresholds on the same page matter more now. A discount of 20 percent or more can trigger wishlist notifications, so a 15 percent discount spends your 30-day cooldown without that email. And a launch discount runs 7 to 14 days, is capped at 40 percent, and can only be set before release. Valve "generally" suggests around 10 to 15 percent.

The rule I would read twice is about timing. A product on its 30-day release cooldown cannot join a seasonal sale. Valve's published calendar puts the Winter Sale from December 17, 2026, to January 4, 2027, and the Spring Sale from March 18 to 25, 2027. A game released in the 30 days before one of those dates starts the sale on cooldown. Valve's FAQ says it can join part way through, once the 30 days are over, if the sale is still running.

Themed fests are a separate track. In Valve's documentation, themed and seasonal sales are self-serve, not curated, and its schedule for the first half of 2027, posted on July 15, lists 11 themed fests between January 14 and June 3, plus two Next Fests. The September 29 post does not mention them.

What I would do differently

Stop budgeting for a slot. Valve says its goal is to let developers "not spend time trying to convince someone at Valve to feature their products." Take it at its word and move that time to the inputs.

Treat tags as targeting. The documentation already says discounted games are eligible for specials sections "based on your game's tags, popularity of your game, and to users that it is recommended." I would audit my tags against what the game actually is, not the genre I would like to be compared to. A wrong tag sends the game to people who will not click.

Make the page convert. Valve chose to report store page visits, wishlists and cart additions, so I assume those are what the new system is tuned for. The capsule, the first screenshots and the first lines of the description are now the pitch, and the audience is each customer the system picks, not someone at Valve.

Run my own discount calendar. Pick each discount for a reason: a content update, an anniversary, a seasonal sale. Valve's own best practices say to time discounts to content updates and to stairstep them. Go to 20 percent or more when I want wishlisters to hear about it.

Choose the launch date against the seasonal sales, not against deal slots. Count 30 days back from December 17 and from March 18 before picking a date.

Watch the traffic source. Bender could attribute more than 7,000 visits to one section of the store. Before and after each discount, that is the line I would watch.

And watch the Steamworks feed. Valve said it would have "more clarity about launch timing" in the "upcoming weeks." As of October 19, its announcements feed shows four posts since, on October 1, 2, 8 and 15, none of them about this. The new tools are the part that decides how much control a developer keeps.

The curated calendar rewarded games that were already big. The new system will reward games it can match to a player. Only the second is something a small studio can work on.

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