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Valve is expanding Steam’s Daily Deals program to support six games per day instead of four, “allowing us to shine a spotlight on more games while giving us a deeper pool of offers to select from.” And if you’re not sure what Steam’s Daily Deals program is, you’re not alone, but don’t worry, that gets explained too, and it’s actually pretty interesting.
“Daily Deals have been around on Steam for well over a decade, and the feature has evolved quite a bit over the years,” Valve wrote in a Steamworks update. “In 2024 alone, the Daily Deal program helped thousands of games gain dedicated visibility on the Steam homepage and relevant tags pages, helping those titles earn tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands of dollars each in the process.”
Also worth noting is that Daily Deals aren’t necessarily one-day affairs like the dearly departed flash sales of days along ago: The “primary visibility and promotion runs for 24 hours,” but the discounts often run for a week, which “makes the promotion accessible to more players and allows the game to benefit from higher visibility on Top Sellers and other charts throughout Steam.”
Eligibility for Daily Deal promotion is based on a number of factors, including “demonstrated customer interest or trending momentum in revenue over the past few months,” whether any discounts are on offer, and whether it’s already been showcased: “All forms of curated promotions are limited to roughly once a year so that other games have an opportunity,” Valve wrote. For those games selected, the impact can be significant, as reflected in the 2024 stats:
- 2,843 games from 1,160 different developers and publishers were featured in Daily Deals.
- These games came from developers in 68 different countries around the world.
- Each game featured as a Daily Deal typically gets over 10 Million impressions on the Steam store during the one-day promotion.
- Each Daily Deal spot can be focused on a single game, or can lead to a multi-game sale event. The largest multi-game sale event was the Czech & Slovak Games Week, which featured 277 games from developers located in that region.
- The range of revenue generated from the Daily Deal featuring is broad and depends on a lot of factors such as the age of the game, the discount percentage, the interest in the game, and so forth. We’ve seen games earn anywhere from ~$10,000 to $2,000,000.
- 87% of Daily Deals in 2024 were for games that had never previously been featured as a Daily Deal. Some were new releases while others were titles that we were now able to highlight as a result of the updates to our program.
That’s a lot of games, although still a relatively small slice of the Steam pie: Nearly 19,000 new games were released on Steam in 2024 alone. But for developers who make the cut, the spotlight can be lucrative, and it’s also good for Steam users trying to sort through the deluge—which is why Valve has decided to increase the number of Daily Deals from four to six.
“In the past year, we found running four spots instead of two is largely additive, and it lets Steam better match the right game with the right player,” Valve wrote. “Because of this, we’re expanding the Daily Deals program to support six titles per day, allowing us to shine a spotlight on more games while giving us a deeper pool of offers to select from and connect with the right user as they view the homepage and any other locations where the Daily Deal appears.”
For developers, Valve has also added a new “promotion recap” enabling them to see how their game performed while under the spotlight, as well as a new Daily Deal history option with a detailed breakdown of sales and traffic.
It’s not an Earth-shattering change overall, but it’s good news for developers struggling for visibility, and it also promises to help users combing through Steam’s utterly massive library in search of something both new and, hopefully, good. When dealing with a behemoth like Steam, every little bit helps.
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Kurt Indovina
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