How to get special Daily Deal featuring on the Steam Front page

Everyone wants “exposure” for their game. Mostly, they just want their game pinned on the front page of Steam. In today’s blog I am diving deep into the way you get that front-page featuring in the form of the “Special Offers” section (Pictured below) but specifically Daily Deals! (I cover Weekend Deals in this Part 2 blog post).

I started this project because I want to answer, what is required before you get a Daily Deal, and what do you get from it?

The research project

Back in January I teamed up with Ichiro Lambe of Totally Human Media to write an automated steam scraping script that every day records what games were featured in the “Special Offers” section and how many reviews they had.

Side note: Ichiro (former Valve Contractor) recently started Totally Human Media to curate all the hidden gems that we miss out on because of algorithm driven discovery. He recently wrote a great post analyzing how many games on Steam have admitted to using AI-generated art. It is a great site, and you should bookmark it (and once he gets a newsletter set up, you should totally subscribe. You should also bug him about starting a newsletter)

Ichiro’s script has been collecting Special Offers data since January 20th, 2024. All the graphs you see here are data from January 20th, 2024 until April 24th, 2024. The script is still running but I figured 3 months of data should give us a pretty good idea of what gets featured. We collected the number of reviews at the moment they started the special offer.

What is a Special Offer?

Valve offers curated featuring in the form of Daily Deals, Weekend Deals, and Free Weekends (you can read about them here). Basically if your game has launched (both EA and 1.0 are eligible), you can open a support ticket and say “Can you give me a Daily Deal / Weekend Deal?”

Valve looks at your sales numbers, your discount history, the number of wishlists you have, and a number of other factors, and makes a totally-human judgment as to whether your games should earn this special featuring.

This is one of the truly “curated” widgets on Steam!

Special Offers is part of a constellation of widgets and features that your game gets access to once it makes a lot of money. This is what I refer to as “Real Steam.” It’s basically one of the perks that Valve offers to “hit” games. If your game hasn’t reached “Real Steam” it is very very hard to get out of the rut baseline sales and secure yourself a Daily Deal. This is why Steam revenue charts always are a hockey stick, it heavily promotes the games that make it to “Real Steam.” All the other games get hidden.

But what kind of revenue numbers are required before they will approve you for a Daily Deal? I used this script to find out. So here is how I think these special offers work based on collecting 3 months of data.

Daily Deal

The Daily Deal is the lowest level of the pyramid in the world of “Real Steam.” It is your first step once your game is a “success.”

Research Results

Here is a graph showing all the games that Got Daily Deals between January 20th and April 24th. Each blue bar is a different game. The height of the bar is the number of reviews it had the day it was featured on the daily deal. I sorted the games based on how many reviews they had (not date).

Daily Deal games are also very high quality. Here is a chart of every game (sorted by percent positive reviews)

Data for games that got daily deals

The Median: 2135 reviews
The Average: 6630 reviews
Only 26% of games had fewer than 1000 reviews
Game with the lowest # of reviews = Block’Em! with 29 reviews (I have no idea what the story was here and how they got it)
The average game with a Daily Deal was 86.5% positive reviews
The lowest rated game was Tale of Immortal which had a 53% positive (but it does have over 187,000 reviews!)

As you can see, most of the games that got Daily Deals are already pretty popular. This is why I always do analysis around “top games earn 1000 reviews.” Valve typically picks games around this review count to start featuring.

Daily Deal Rules

Your game gets featured for only 24 hours in the Special Offers section.
Daily Deals appear every day of the week Monday Through Sunday
Valve has changed the algorithm a bit because there used to only be 2 “Daily Deal” slots per day but have expanded it to 4.
Valve also started limiting the number of times your game can appear in a Daily Deal per year. You used to be able to do 2 Daily Deals per year, now it is only 1.
Daily Deals used to be a hand-requested, hand placed process. However Valve is beta-testing a self-scheduler. Based on my select secret spies, if you request a Daily Deal (and you are eligible) Valve will grant you access to the beta tool.

Daily Deal Results

Estimating revenue from Daily Deals is difficult because the featured games often have been out for a while, have deeper discounts, and review counts come in at a different rate when people buy the game for cheap.

So I reached out to a developer who got one recently.

The developer of The Matriarch (I wrote about their TikTok success here) recently posted his experiences with a Daily Deal on Reddit. His Daily Deal was on April 22nd. At the time of the daily deal he had 591 reviews and his game is a very cheap $4.99 (typical for social deduction games). As is common with Daily Deals, he discounted the game to a historic low of $1.99 (60% off).

As a result of the Daily Deal he sold 6677 copies in the 48 hours after his Daily Deal. This is a huge increase considering he said he sold 1130 in the whole month before the Daily Deal.

The developer provided me with this sales graph. As you can see, although the daily deal is only 24 hours, you get 2 days of drastically elevated sales. Plus there is an ongoing increase in sales for days after like the secondary shockwave after throwing a big rock in a still pond.

What is typical?

Based on my experience working with other clients, the Matriarch had a typical Daily Deal experience. My gut feel is $10,000-$70,000 is the result of getting a Daily Deal.

I have worked with clients who made games that barely were successful enough to earn a Daily Deal in the eyes of Valve and their games just had poorer conversion rates during Daily Deals. And I have seen games that do very very well before securing a Deal and they did VERY well during the Daily Deal. This is why Steam doesn’t just let every game have a Daily Deal. Just getting exposure isn’t the only reason games are not successful, sometimes the game just isn’t interesting even if you put it on the front page.

When to ask for a Daily Deal

Although Valve is rolling out a quasai-automated tool where you get notified if your game is eligible and schedule, Valve has said you should still reach out to them to ask if you are eligible. BUT! You need to put together a deal.

Here is what I mean by “put together a deal.” While I was digging through the data I found Oblivion Override got a Daily Deal that was synced to occur when a bunch of other things were coming in.

January 25th was their daily deal but it was also when their 1.0 launch
They had a Historic Low Price
They also had new content.
I don’t know for sure but I bet they lined up a bunch of streamers to play the game.
The game was sitting on 1094 reviews just before their daily deal.

So see what I mean, there were several “big” events happening all at the same time? I bet the oblivion Override people used all that in their pitch so they could secure the deal.

This chart shows the history of reviews for Oblivion Override. That huge spike up in January was their 1.0 launch & Daily Deal. You can also see they hit 1000 reviews just before the Daily Deal.

Looking at the Oblivion Override price history you can also see that the Daily Deal had a 35% discount which was their historic low.

Franchise sales

Another advanced trick you can do is ask for a Daily Deal for your entire games catalog (assuming you have more than 1 game.) Basically you pick your best selling game and ask for a Daily Deal on it. Then you ask them if you can upgrade it to a “franchise sale” and include your upcoming or past games. If Valve thinks it looks like a good idea, they will give you access to a special tool where you can make your own mini-festival JUST for your games.

5 companies managed to do this during the 3 month sample period. Here they are

The future of Daily Deals

Daily Deals are becoming less effective in 2024. More games are featured every day, and Valve only allows each game to have only 1 per year. I have heard from several developers that their recent Daily Deals have earned them less than previous ones.

But this is a good thing… Let me explain.

A hockey stick sales curve is one of the biggest problems with Steam. The rich get richer. It is more and more a hit-driven enterprise (even more than it normally is). It is becoming a less egalitarian platform.

This is the average revenue for all games on Steam (Data provided by Vginsights). And note that chart is logarithmic and it STILL has a hockey stick.

But the recent Daily Deal changes are slightly reversing the hockey stick.

In the old Daily Deal System you just had to know a person at Valve and ask for a daily deal. Most developers (even those who had hit games) didn’t know to ask for a Deal. Now that it is an automated scheduling tool, more people will learn about them and actually use them.

There are more slots now. Before there were only 2 Daily Deal slots per day and games could get 2 per year. That means, theoretically only 365 games could get featuring per year. Now that there are at least 4 slots per day and each game is only allowed 1 per year, theoretically 1,460 games can get featuring.

So yes, you will earn less per Deal but more games will get access to this featuring. You will have to make less so more people to get featured. Valve basically lowered the first step in “Real Steam” visibility so more games can partake.

In my next blog I will be looking at Weekend Deals. These are the SUPERCHARGED Daily Deal and are still very exclusive and still provide a TON of visibility and sales. Stay tuned.

Daily Deal Recommendations

Step 1) If your games has earned somewhere in the $150,000 gross revenue within about 9 months, and your reviews are good, you might be eligible for a daily deal. Start building a case for yourself…

Step 2) Prepare a new content update

Step 3) Get ready to drop your price to a new low.

Step 4) Open a support ticket with Valve and put all this in a pitch to them and ask for a Daily Deal.

Other things that MIGHT influence whether you get a Daily Deal

(but nobody really knows)

Your historic low isn’t TOO low (like isn’t 75% within the most recent year or two).
You have a ton of wishlists.
Past discounts have shown that those wishlists are converting to sales.
Your game is translated (remember Daily Deals are the same around the world so Valve prefers games that are localized for most of the languages.)
You have some sort of interesting reason for the featuring (new content, anniversary of your studio or game, you are announcing a sequel to this game, big external reason such as it is Christmas and you have a Christmas game).
Your game has good reviews.
You are nice.
Your game isn’t too old (probably released within the last 5 years.
You have a long history of making quality games for Valve.