Steam Featuring Explained: Daily Deals, Sale Pages, How to Ask

Steam has five official featuring surfaces for released games in 2026, and only one is fully self-serve. Daily Deals are invite-gated and require roughly tens of thousands of dollars in revenue per month; Midweek and Weekend Deals are hand-curated for games with hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent revenue; seasonal sale visibility is algorithmic and open to every discounted game; and developer/publisher/franchise sale pages can be run by any partner once per calendar year with a support ticket. The rest of this post covers what each surface pays, how you actually get each one, and why “just email Valve” gives borderline games maybe a 10% shot (Zukowski’s estimate, covered below).

Everything here comes from the current Steamworks discounting documentation (I checked it in July 2026), Valve’s public announcements, and Chris Zukowski’s tracking of every Daily Deal Valve granted in 2024. Where a number is developer-reported or community-estimated rather than official, I say so.

The word “featuring” gets used loosely. On Steam it means a slot Valve controls on the front page or a major sale hub, as opposed to the always-on algorithmic surfaces (search, discovery queue, more-like-this) covered in our Steam algorithm explainer.

One rule sits above all of it, straight from the Daily Deals documentation: “All forms of curated promotions are limited to roughly once a year so that other games have an opportunity.” You do not stack a Daily Deal, a Weekend Deal, and a curated sale-page slot in the same quarter. Pick your shot.

The Daily Deal is the featuring surface most indie games can realistically reach. Six games rotate onto the Steam homepage every day at 10am Pacific. Valve expanded the program from four slots to six in February 2025, noting that a featured game typically gets over 10 million impressions during its day. The front-page placement lasts 24 hours; the discount itself must run 7 to 14 days.

How you get one changed in 2024, and a lot of older advice is now wrong. The current process:

1. 01Valve’s system flags your game as eligible, based on “demonstrated customer interest or trending momentum in revenue over the past few months.” The published bar: games that qualify “sustainably reach tens of thousands of dollars in revenue per month.”
2. 02Valve emails an invite to Steamworks contacts with the Receive Steamworks Communication and Manage Pricing & Discounts permissions. The invite expires after 30 days whether or not anyone reads it. Check those permission assignments today; an invite rotting in a former employee’s inbox is a real failure mode.
3. 03You pick any open day within the next 6 months on the Daily Deal calendar and attach a discount. No back-and-forth with a human.

Three eligibility details from the docs worth quoting because they kill common plans. Games released within the last 2-3 months are too new to evaluate. Your game’s first discount ever is not eligible, no matter how old the title is. And Valve expects “a compelling discount,” with some flexibility if the deal coincides with a major update, DLC, or a 1.0 release. Discount depth is your call within the platform rules (10% minimum, 95% maximum); our discount strategy guide covers how deep to go at each stage of a game’s life.

Valve’s own framing, from the same February 2025 update: featured games earned “anywhere from ~$10,000 to $2,000,000” during their promotion. That range is honest and useless, so here is the community data. Zukowski’s tally of every Daily Deal of 2024 counted 1,161 unique games featured that year and put typical earnings at $20,000-$30,000 for the deal day, driven as much by the wishlist spike as the immediate sales. These are estimates built from public review counts, not Valve payout data.

The best public single-game account I know of is The Matriarch, whose developer reported numbers after an April 2024 Daily Deal at 60% off ($4.99 down to $1.99):

Six months of baseline sales in two days is the shape of the win. The catch is that featuring multiplies your existing conversion rate rather than fixing it. Ten million impressions on a page that converts poorly is ten million people scrolling past you. If a Daily Deal might be in your future, pressure-test the page first - the free Steam Page Analyzer will flag the capsule, screenshot, and description problems that waste featured traffic.

Who really gets these? In Zukowski’s April 2024 analysis of Daily Deal recipients, the median game had 2,135 reviews at the time of featuring and recipients averaged 86.5% positive. His working estimate for the revenue bar was about $150,000 gross within 9 months of release. But the floor is softer than the median suggests: in the 2024 data, about 10% of featured games had fewer than 400 reviews, and 22 games had 100 or fewer. To turn review counts into rough revenue, use the reviews-to-sales multiplier.

These two get confused with Daily Deals all the time, and the confusion matters because how you get one is different. Midweek Deals hold the front page for 72 hours (Monday 10am to Thursday 10am Pacific) and Weekend Deals for 96 hours (Thursday to Monday), with up to six slots of each per week. The attached discounts default to a week and can run 3-14 days (Midweek) or 4-14 days (Weekend).

Unlike Daily Deals, there is no invite-plus-calendar system here. The Steamworks docs say Valve fills these slots itself: “we tend to focus on the most-played or best-selling games on Steam,” and the stated threshold for raising your hand is blunt - “If your game has lots of happy customers and hundreds of thousands of revenue over past few months, feel free to contact us.” That is roughly 10x the Daily Deal bar. For most indies, Midweek and Weekend Deals are a surface you graduate into after a hit, not a target for a first game. The docs also state the slots “aren’t negotiated for or sold” - there is no rate card, no agency backchannel, and anyone selling you guaranteed front-page placement is lying.

Four times a year (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter) the front page rebuilds itself around a sale, and this is the one featuring surface with no gate at all. Per the seasonal sales documentation, every released game can join by entering a discount, participation is not blocked by discount cooldowns and does not create one, and featuring inside the sale is algorithmic: “Discounted titles are eligible to appear in various 'specials’ sections throughout Steam, based on your game’s tags, popularity of your game, and to users that it is recommended.”

The front page also refreshes continuously during the sale rather than fixing a lineup, so a mid-size game with strong tags and good conversion genuinely surfaces to its audience. This is the recommendation engine doing the curating, which means the levers are the ones you already control: accurate tags, a page that converts, and a discount of 20% or more so wishlist email notifications fire.

Remaining 2026 dates from the Steamworks docs: Autumn Sale October 1-8, Winter Sale December 17 - January 4, 2027. The full-year calendar, including the themed fests between seasonals, is in our 2026 sales events guide, and the Steam sale calendar tool will map your cooldowns against upcoming events so a stray discount does not lock you out of one.

This is the most underused surface, because it is the one you can simply have. Any Steamworks partner can run a custom sale page - a themed, custom-URL page collecting your catalog on discount - once per calendar year per page type. Per the sale page documentation, you need a Creator Home page linked to your games, most or all of the catalog on discount with the discounted items up top, and a ticket to Valve at least three weeks before the event starts. Review takes 2-3 business days.

The self-serve version gets you the page itself plus placement on the Specials hub and a wishlist-email hook. Front-page featuring for a sale page is a separate, curated ask: the docs require a minimum of three paid titles and a request at least three months in advance, and Valve says yes based on the same player-data logic as everything else. In 2024, 55 of these publisher and franchise sale events also received Daily Deal-style front page slots, per Zukowski’s tracking.

A single-game developer reading this has a legitimate move here too: a “developer page” sale timed to a content update, cross-promoted with a visibility round update post, stacks two visibility mechanics you fully control.

The Special Offers page is a carousel mixing Valve’s curated promotions with “organically-recommended discounted products.” Any custom discount you run makes you eligible for the organic half; personalization decides who sees you. Weeklong Deals work on the same self-serve logic: they start every Monday at 10am Pacific and run seven days, and a discount aligned to that window joins the pool. None of this is front-page featuring, but it is discount visibility with zero permission required, and for games below every curated threshold it is most of what “featuring” will mean for a while.

The most persistent piece of folk wisdom in indie circles is that featuring is there for whoever emails. The truth in 2026 is narrower.

You can ask. The Daily Deal docs literally say “please feel free to contact us here and ask about running a Daily Deal” if the eligibility description fits your game. What asking cannot do is substitute for the revenue signal. Zukowski’s advice to borderline candidates in his 2024 tally: “Just open a support ticket. You have a 10% chance.” That is his back-of-envelope read on how many small games show up in the featured data, not a measured ticket success rate, and Valve publishes nothing here.

What separates the 10% that land it, based on the cases he documents, is that they do not ask naked. They bundle the request with a reason Valve’s curators can defend: a 1.0 launch out of Early Access, a major free update, a new historic-low price, a review count milestone. Oblivion Override timed its ask to a 1.0 release plus new content and got the slot. The pitch is one paragraph in a Steamworks ticket, sent 4-6 weeks ahead of the moment, with the numbers stated plainly.

What never works: asking pre-launch, asking during your launch discount (first discounts are ineligible by rule), asking monthly, or paying a third party who claims Valve connections. Featuring is built from player data, and Valve says so in the docs.

Work the list from the bottom of the pyramid up:

1. 01Fix conversion first. Run your page through the free analyzer before chasing impressions. Featuring multiplies whatever conversion rate you have.
2. 02Take the ungated featuring every time. Discount at 20%+ in every seasonal sale you are eligible for. Check the 2026 event calendar and plan cooldowns with the sale calendar tool so you never arrive at a seasonal locked out.
3. 03Audit your Steamworks permissions now. Daily Deal invites go to accounts with the right permission flags and die after 30 days. Two minutes of admin protects a $20,000 event.
4. 04Book your annual sale page. Self-serve, once a year, three weeks notice. Time it to your biggest update.
5. 05Ask for a Daily Deal exactly once a year, with a hook. Post-launch, off your first discount, bundled with a 1.0 or major update, numbers in the first paragraph.
6. 06Treat Midweek and Weekend Deals as a someday. If your game clears hundreds of thousands in a few months, Valve will likely find you before you find them.

Get steady sales and a converting page right and the invites start arriving on their own.