The front page of Steam has long been a hot commodity for game developers and publishers, but next year, some big changes are coming. Valve has announced that it’ll be changing how it handles game discoverability during sales and promotions on Steam, as it’ll be moving away from the old model of a tightly controlled page through a manually curated calendar to dynamic, personalized recommendations that’ll cater to individual user preferences and their purchase history.
Historically, Valve employees selected which games got featured in a limited number of fixed slots on the Steam front page, and only a fraction of discounted games got valuable front-page visibility. According to Valve, preliminary experiments resulted in up to 10 times as many games appearing per day in the Discounts & Events section, leading to measurable increases in store page visits and wishlist additions.
What does this mean? For developers, it means that they won’t need to rely on relationships, manual pitches, or sheer luck to potentially get a front-page placement. This will also effectively level the playing field for all developers, as smaller teams and publishers typically don’t have the budget to compete with AAA blockbuster marketing teams. Valve added that it has already paused scheduling curated placements in the Weekend Deals, Midweek Deals, and Daily Deals sections, and it will soon roll out new and updated tools to help developers better manage their discounts and sale events on Steam.
“Our goal is to let developers focus on crafting the most compelling games and deals for customers, and not spend time trying to convince someone at Valve to feature their products,” Valve wrote. The rollout window for this change to the Steam storefront will be in early 2027.
This news comes on the eve of a new Steam sales event, as the week-long Steam Autumn Sale kicks off on October 1. There’ll also be a new Next Fest held at the end of October, while themed events for the rest of 2026 include Steam Scream V Fest, Auto-Battler RPG Fest, and Cooking Fest before the Steam Winter Sale in December.
