Valve Will Retire Steam’s Hand-Picked Daily and Weekend Deals for Personalised

Valve will stop hand-picking the games in Steam's Discounts & Events section. It will move to personalised recommendations in early 2027, Inven Global reported. Valve announced the plan in a Steamworks post on September 29 (US time).

It has already paused scheduling new curated placements.

The paused slots are Daily Deals, Midweek Deals and Weekend Deals. Placements that were already booked will run as planned. Developers don't need to take any action.

What changes on the storefront

Until now, slots were booked by developers through Steamworks or assigned by Valve's Steam team. The number of slots was fixed. Only some of the games discounted at any given time reached the front page.

Valve said more discounted games and sale events will get a chance at homepage and wider Steam visibility once the new system is live. Each player will see different games, and which ones appear will vary from account to account.

Valve's test results

The change follows experiments run over recent months. In them, Valve swapped some curated spots for personalised picks. Valve said the section then showed 10 times more games to users each day.

Store page visits, wishlist additions and cart additions also rose, though Valve did not publish figures.

Valve said a manually managed calendar makes less sense when customer tastes are so varied and so many relevant deals are live at once. It added that it does not expect the new system to be perfect straight away.

It is confident, though, that the system will work out better for customers and developers.

Launch timing and developer tools

There is no exact launch date. Valve said it is still tuning the details. It will share the schedule in the coming weeks.

New and updated tools for managing discounts and sale events will arrive alongside the change. Valve said the aim is for developers to spend their time on making games and deals. They should not have to persuade someone at Valve to feature their products.

Inven Global noted that the fixed deal slots have been a key exposure channel for indie and mid-sized developers with small marketing budgets. Without them, it said, placement will depend on user engagement data and recommendation criteria.

Developers noticed changes earlier in September

Tech Insider (tech-insider) reported that the Discounts & Events grid had already started showing different games to different people before September 17. It said the picks appeared to be based on each account's playtime, wishlists and purchases.

Some independent developers saw extra store-page visits from the section.

Tech Insider also said Valve had published no blog post or changelog about that shift at the time. Valve's September 29 announcement is the company's own description of the plan and of the experiments behind it.

The post Valve Will Retire Steam’s Hand-Picked Daily and Weekend Deals for Personalised Feeds in 2027 appeared first on Stevivor.