Official Group for Steamworks Development Support

Update: How The Steam Daily Deals Program Helps Boost Games Of All Sizes

Today brings yet another update to Steam Daily Deals, a program we've been hard at work on expanding and refining over the past year to support more games and better help players connect with their next favorite title. The Daily Deal promotion program has been around on Steam for over a decade, and is a curated promotion where a game is featured on the front page of Steam as well as on applicable tag and genre pages for 24 hours.

In addition to highlighting these updates, we thought it would be useful to explain some of our thinking behind the program and how it has been going lately.

This post in brief:

• Results from Daily Deals - How the program has lead to a positive impact for over 2,500 games in 2024
  
• Today's updates to the program - Exciting new developments to the program, adding reporting and accepting more games
  
• More on Daily Deals - How they work and how to tell if your game is eligible

Daily Deals have been around on Steam for well over a decade, and the feature has evolved quite a bit over the years. 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.

What follows are a few statistics we found fascinating as it relates to the power of Daily Deal featuring:

In 2024:

• 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.

New: Promotion Recap

Today's update builds on top of the updates and additions we’ve released over the past year, adding a post-promotion recap on the Steamworks dashboard immediately once your game has run a Steam Daily Deal. This recap is intended to make it easy for developers to see how well their game did during the Daily Deal featuring.



New: Daily Deal history, with detailed sales and traffic reporting

In addition to the summary provided on your Steamworks dashboard for recently run Daily Deals, you can also find a history of past promotions, including revenue and traffic reporting, broken down for better analysis. If the Daily Deal promotion included more than one game, or more than one purchase option (eg. includes a Deluxe Edition), you'll find a detailed breakdown illustrating how much each product or edition contributed to the overall promotion's revenue.





New: Expanding Daily Deals to six daily spots

Beginning in January 2024, we started running four simultaneous Daily Deal promotions, with Steam prioritizing which two will be shown first to any given user based on that user's gameplay and their Steam preferences (for more on how this works, see below). 

In the past year, we found running four spots instead of two is largely additive, and it lets Steam better match the right game with the right player. Because of this, we're expanding the Daily Deals program to support six titles per day, allowing us to shine a spotlight on more games while giving us a deeper pool of offers to select from and connect with the right user as they view the homepage and any other locations where the Daily Deal appears.




Q. If there are now six Daily Deals, how does Steam choose which one to show first?

A. Over time, we've refined how Daily Deals work, expanding the program to feature more games, which has meant that we need to figure out the right way to connect players with the best offers for them. We do this with a prioritization algorithm that looks at the games played by each user and matches them against the set of current Daily Deal promotions. For each user, the promotions seen on the homepage may be different, and the order those promotions appear may be different depending on the games that person plays.

Q. Why does a Daily Deal discount actually last longer than a day?

A. Games featured as a Daily Deal are promoted on the Steam homepage and in specific locations throughout the Steam store. The primary visibility and promotion runs for 24 hours, but discounts on the games often run for a week. 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.

Q. Which games qualify for a Daily Deal?

A. Our primary goal with the Daily Deal program is to shine a spotlight on interesting games that we suspect many players are interested in. These promotions show up on the homepage of Steam, as well as applicable tag and genre pages, so we need to have some confidence that the game will be of interest to enough players to make it worthwhile featuring the game that prominently. We generally look for games that have consistently reached tens of thousands of dollars in revenue per month, which is a very large pool of games - several thousands of games in fact. But there's more to it than an opportunity to run a discount. It's often true that pairing an update or in-game event with a compelling discount is a way to bring interest and maximize the efforts developers put into the game and into the communication about their game. For more details, please see: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/discounts/dailydeal


Q. How do I apply for a Daily Deal or learn more about Daily Deals?

A. We have a great set of documentation that goes into detail on how Daily Deals work, how to tell if your game is eligible, and how to reach out and request a Daily Deal for your game. For more details, please see: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/discounts/dailydeal