Steam Ditches Curated Calendar for Algorithm-Driven Discounts and Events Tab

Valve is retiring the manually curated calendar behind Steam's "Discounts and Events" tab and replacing it with algorithmic, per-customer recommendations. The company says the new system shows far more games per day, and an early beneficiary, a niche indie title published by Hooded Horse, saw its store traffic jump.

What Valve is changing

Valve said in an announcement to Steamworks partners on Tuesday that it will "move away from a manual calendar-based approach and into something more dynamic and personalized for each customer." Until now, Valve scheduled games to rotate through the section itself, or partners booked slots directly through Steamworks. Under the new model, Steam's algorithms decide which games a given player sees.

Valve says it spent the last few months testing the approach by swapping some curated spots for personalized recommendations. "By featuring games in a more personalized way in the Discounts & Events section, we were able to show 10x more games to customers in a given day in that section," the company wrote. "As a result, we saw meaningful increases in store page visits, wishlists, and cart additions."

Timing and developer tools

Valve has already "paused scheduling curated placements" on the page. Developers with a slot already booked will keep it, and more details on timing will arrive in the "upcoming weeks." The curated calendar is expected to end entirely early next year.

Valve also promised "new and updated tools to help developers better manage their discounts and sale events on Steam." The company framed the goal this way: "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."

The flip side is that visibility on this page will depend on how the algorithm treats a given game, rather than on a human decision at Valve. Valve has not detailed what signals the recommendations will use.

Early results from the test

The test was visible to people watching Steam closely. Earlier in September, GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless noticed that featured games on the Discounts and Events page had become more personalized. He called it "a good move to help the little guys, done quietly."

Hooded Horse CEO Tim Bender replied on LinkedIn with numbers from one of the publisher's games, which he did not name. According to the screenshots he posted, the Discounts and Events page drove more than 7,000 visits to the game's Steam page in a single month, against 7,355 over the past six months. "So only 14 visits from the prior 5 months," he wrote.

Bender was clear about what that meant for smaller titles. "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 said.

What to watch

Valve's own figures cover reach (10x more games shown per day) and downstream actions like wishlists and cart additions, but it has not published absolute numbers. Bender's example is a single game from a publisher known for supporting niche strategy titles, so it shows what the test can do for a small release, not what every developer should expect once the calendar is gone for good. The promised tooling updates and timing details in the coming weeks should clarify how much control developers keep over their own sales.