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: 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