Valve updates the Steam Daily Deals program and gives some stats

Valve have done a little adjustment to the display of Steam Daily Deals to show more games. They also now give developers some more stats, and gave us all a bit of an overview.

For gamers the only real difference here is that they're bumping up the display from four to six games in total in the special offers section. The name is also a little deceptive, since it's not just a single day as the deals often run for quite a bit longer, which Valve said "We found that many of the platform effects of a game running a discount, particularly a featured discount such as the Daily Deal, causes a lot of additional visibility, buzz, and lift in sales for days following the initial day. Extending the discount to run for a week makes the promotion accessible to more players and allows the game to benefit from higher visibility on Top Sellers and other charts throughout Steam."

Giving us some stats and background on it during 2024 they highlighted these points:

• 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.

For developers they've added a new post-promotion recap on the Steamworks dashboard, so developers can see how it did at a glance. There's also a new daily deal history section for developers to look back on.

How exactly do Valve decide what games to actually show to us all? Valve said they've refined it over time and they use a "prioritization algorithm", which is based on what you've played to match you up with the current games running a promotion. So you might see a list of deals that are different to others. You'll see your daily deal picks across the Steam homepage as well as the tag / genre pages too.

Of course all the sales are available on the dedicated sales page at any time.

Source: Valve