Valve announced that it will be phasing out manually managed promotions on Steam, such as Weekend Deals, Midweek Deals, and Daily Deals.
Perhaps reaching the limits of manual management, the company will transition to an automated curation system
Until now, the “Sales & Events” section on Steam consisted of curated slots scheduled either directly by publishers via Steamworks or independently by the Steam operations team.
Amid this, Valve reportedly had been conducting experiments to replace some of the curated recommendation slots with more dynamic and personalized recommendations. This allowed them to increase the number of games displayed to users per day by more than tenfold, which reportedly led to a significant increase in store page views, items added to wishlists, and items added to carts.
Valve is supportive of automated curation, stating, “Given the current landscape where user preferences are diversifying and there is always a wealth of relevant, valuable information available to users, the constraint of manually managing a calendar no longer makes much sense.”
While it’s not necessarily the case that only new releases are selected for these traditional curation slots, the fact is that over 21,000 new games were released on Steam in 2025, and as of 2026, there are already approximately 20,000 games released to date.With this number of games continuing to grow on Steam year after year, the volume has likely reached a point where manual curation is no longer feasible (Reference:SteamDB).
A specific date for implementing these changes has not yet been set, and an announcement will be made once the details are finalized.
The scheduling of the currently used manually curated promotions (Weekend Deals, Midweek Deals, and Daily Deals) has already been temporarily suspended, and it has been announced that they will be completely discontinued in early 2027.Additionally, as part of these changes, Steam states that it “plans to provide new and updated tools to help developers better manage discounts and sales events on Steam.”
*UPDATE (September 30, 2026, 11:39 a.m.): The main text has been revised.
