In today’s post I will explain how to get one of the biggest prizes on Steam: The Weekend Deal. Last week I wrote about the Steam Daily Deal which typically earns games $10,000- $70,000 during a 24-hour period of featuring. The Weekend Deal lasts during the four busiest days on Steam (Friday through Monday). Off the record, a developer told me they sold 100,000 units and gained 60,000 wishlists during their 4-day Weekend Deal featuring. It is huge, but is reserved for the biggest games on Steam. 

In today’s blog post I will look at what are typical review counts for games that get the Weekend Deal and give some additional tips on how to get one.

What is a Weekend Deal?

The Weekend Deal is part of the Special Offers Widget. Four games per week are granted the Weekend Slot across the 4 pages of the carousell. Each game takes up 2/3rds of each page in the carousel. The other two slots are filled in with the Daily Deal. Here is a single day example Special Offers Widget I sampled by flipping through the tab.

With 4 slots for the Weekend deal, and 52 weekends per year, that leaves at most 208 games that can have this honor. I think the Special Offers widget is hidden during the big Summer and Winter Sales so it could be as few as 200 games featured. By my estimation these are the top 0.2% of games released on Steam (Based on how many games are released each year and how old the featured games were).

Results of the weekend deal

As mentioned above, a developer I am familiar with sold 100,000 units during the 4 days of the Weekend deal featuring.

I also spoke to Jordy Lakiere who created We Who Are About To Die which had a Weekend Deal on Feb 4 2023. 

How did he get the Weekend Deal? 83 Days after the launch of his game he had 3000 reviews.This is BIG hit. But Jordy was brave. Instead of just asking for a standard Daily Deal, Jordy went big and asked for the Weekend Deal. They gave it to him based on the number of outstanding wishlists and the units he had sold already. As part of the deal he offered them the at the time historical low discount of 25% off. 

According to Jordy, every single day of his 4-Day Weekend Deal earned him more money than his launch day. 

Weekend deals are that big. 

Who gets in  

So who is eligible for Weekend Deals? Similar to Daily Deals, you apply and your game is curated by Valve. They look at a bunch of numbers and other details that I am not 100% sure are and then make a decision. My hunch is they use the same criteria for judging whether you are eligible for a Daily Deal but set the bar much higher. For more details on what Valve looks for, see my Daily Deal blog under the section Other things that MIGHT influence whether you get a Daily Deal

As with the Daily Deal story I published last week, I used a script written by Ichiro Lambe of Totally Human Media to note every game posted in the SPECIAL DEALS section for the last 3 months. 

Here is what I found. 

Data for games that got Weekend Deals

  • The Median: 19,990 reviews
  • The Average: 54,068 reviews
  • Top game in the list: Valheim which had 376,821 reviews at the time of the Weekend Deal
  • Bottom game in the list: The Crew Motorfest by Ubisoft with only 212 reviews (I know! We will look at this in a minute)

For context, The median game that got a Daily Deals had 2135 reviews. That means Weekend Deal games are typically 10X as popular as games that get Daily Deal. These are the top 0.5% of games.

How old are the Weekend Deal Games?

Age graph

  • The Median age of a game is 368 days. 
  • The Average age of a game is 906 days. 
  • The velocity of games (reviews / num days) = 91 reviews per day. 
  • Oldest game in the list Mount & Blade: Warband (released in 2010)
  • Second oldest game: Cities: Skylines (released in 2015)
  • The youngest game? The Crew Motorfest by Ubisoft which was 1 day old. (I knoooooow, we will look at this in a minute)

Basically, the Weekend Deals are for games that had huge success (~90 reviews / day) in their first year and then they celebrate with a Weekend Deal. 

The downside of curation

Let’s talk about The Crew Motorfest. This is a multiplayer racing game put out by Ubisoft. It launched in April of this year. Day 1 it got a Weekend Deal. It now sits at 600 or so Mixed Reviews. 

If any other game from any other company applied to get a Weekend Deal, or even a Daily Deal, they would have been rejected outright. I mean, I get it. Ubisoft as a whole has made Valve millions and millions of dollars. From that perspective, the least Valve could do is toss them one 4-day promotion as a loyal business partner. But it still stings when you consider all the indie studios that could really use a huge boost from a Weekend Deal. 

And The Crew Motorfest isn’t the only game. Here is a list of more AAA games that got Weekend Deals despite having numbers that were far below even a Daily Deal. 

This favoritism is the double-edged sword of curation. Sometimes games that don’t deserve it get curated in because of political reasons. I don’t think this is the only reason why it is so hard to be a small indie dev. It just looks bad. 

Timing your daily deal

So if you launch a game and it is doing really well (Like let’s say you are on track to earn 3000+ reviews within 100 days) wait. Don’t ask for the Daily Deal, instead ask for the Weekend Deal. The worst Valve can say is, “let’s try a Daily Deal” Instead. 

Here is a scatter plot of number of reviews vs the days since the game has been released. Half of all Weekend Deals occurred within the first year of their release. 

My hunch is that you only get 1 weekend deal ever (or it is VERY VERY rare). So you might as well do it as early as possible when your price is the highest (historic low isn’t too low) and people are still really excited for your game.

What Weekend Deals tell us about the Steam “Meta”

The thing you have to understand about Weekend Deals is that they are one of the reasons the average revenue for games on Steam look like this crazy hockey stick. (Remember, this is a Log-scale graph)

The Steam algorithm is built to super charge games that have that *magic*. Like super duper super change some games. 

For instance. If your game announcement goes well, or you launch a demo and streamers LOVE it and you get 40,000 wishlists in a month (which Dome Keeper did), you then get fantastic featuring during Steam Next Fest and dozens of other virtual online festivals. Then you roll into launch with 100,000 wishlists which means you probably are eligible for requesting a popup which means you probably will get enough sales to earn a Daily Deal or possibly a Weekend Deal. 

You see how Steam fast tracks games that have *the magic*. 

I say this not to discourage you. If you are grinding it out and earning 1 to 2 wishlists a day it can feel like these other games are existing in another dimension.

I guess my only advice is, I really think the game you pick to make and the fun does not scale linearly. It isn’t like the people who have these games that get weekend deals are working 10,000x harder than you even though their profits are 10,000x higher. It isn’t like a Weekend Deal game is 10,000X better than a game than a game that only has 50 reviews. Many of the games that got these stellare deals have just the right alchemy of genre and novel gameplay mechanics. 

I think the most important thing to understand is that you don’t grind up to this type of featuring. It isn’t about slowly collecting wishlists and keeping your nose to the grindstone. Instead, it is about iterating quickly on games until you find one that has the *magic*. Then doubling and tripling down on the game that seems to have that lift. 

The reason I built the HTMAG Benchmarks Page so that you can see what other games that do have the magic are getting. All game launches are risky and you can’t 100% predict success or failure. But I think it is real dangerous to continue to delay delay delay and add scope to a game that doesn’t show signs that it has *the magic*. Then there are other times where games clearly show they are connecting and it has signs of *magic*. Then it makes sense to really make sure the game is perfect. You should account for Opportunity Cost when deciding which projects you are going to undertake, when ones you are going to delay, and which ones you are going to double down on.. 

Appendix: 

Here is the public spreadsheet of games that earned Weekend Deals from the period of January 20th, 2024 through April 19th, 2024. These were recorded by Ichiro Lambe of Totally Human Media’s script.