Last year I worked with Ichiro Lambe to write a script that scrapes the front page of Steam to record every Game that appears in the Special Offers section on Steam. Ichiro, by the way, is working really hard on solving the visibility issue for indie devs with his company We ❤ Every Game. He just launched a cool Steam Next Fest browser you should check out.
The Daily Deals script has been dutifully recording every “Special Offer” since it started on January 20th, 2024. It has now been 1 year and 1 month so I thought I would check in to see what’s new with Daily Deals.
What is a Daily Deal again?
A Daily Deal is a special offer where Valve gives your game 1 day of visibility on the front page of Steam. These slots are quasi-curated by the Valve staff after the game reaches some unknown threshold of revenue. See the Steamworks documentation for more
Here is a screenshot of today’s “Special Offers” widget; Laika and Venba both have Daily Deals today. Skald and F1 Manager 24 have Midweek deals which last longer and are harder to get.
A Daily Deal is important because it is the very lowest level of post-launch visibility you can ask Valve for. I like to study it because it tells you what the minimum level of performance Valve looks for when deciding whether a game is “worthy” (in their eyes) for featuring. If you have ever heard me say that a game got into “Real Steam” I mean that it got at LEAST a daily deal.
Basically you can’t hope to make real money with your game, if you can’t get a Daily Deal. It is the first step in the post-launch visibility ladder.
If you want more details I wrote about Daily Deals here
How much do you get in a Daily Deal?
It does depend on the game (I will get to that in a minute), but ball park, your game can earn around $20,000-$30,000 on the day you get your Daily Deal.
Recently, one of the developers of cozy management game Minami Lane (I first wrote about them here) had a daily deal and they reported that they sold almost as many units on the Daily Deal day as they did when they launched. Here is their sales chart:
This chart was posted on the developers post on Reddit..
The developer (Doot) also told me that they got more wishlists during the Daily Deal than in any single day EVER. These wishlists will later convert, making that Daily Deal even more valuable long term.
And few people know it, but Among Us owes their virality to a Daily Deal. The Among us folks had a Korean twitch streamer play the game which got a decent number of sales but not great. But the sales were enough for Valve to give them a Daily Deal which gave them a ton of wishlists but still not a break out hit. But then during the next major sale, those wishlists converted and that is what triggered virality. Among Us’s success is a bit more complicated than “it was streamers.”
What were the Daily Deals of 2024
In 2024 Valve made changes to give more visibility to more games. In earlier years, games could request 2 Daily Deals per year and Steam featured 2 Daily Deals on any day. So theoretically there were 730 slots. But, with games getting 2 shots at it per year, a max of 365 unique games could be featured every year.
In 2024, Valve increased the Daily Deal slots to 4 and said that no game could get more than 1 in a calendar year. This means there was now an annual max daily deal capacity of 1460 games.
Also they made the Daily Deal process more transparent. Before, Daily Deals were kind of a secret where only devs who knew how Steam worked would have the wherewithal to ask for one. To help devs who weren’t so savvy, Valve added a Daily Deal request tool where if your game met some mysterious threshold you would just get an automated notification that you were eligible for one and that you could schedule them through the Steamworks UI.
Looking at the scraping data, we recorded 1161 unique games. Not QUITE 1460 because I think Valve doesn’t do Daily Deals during the Steam seasonal sales. Also, they sometimes give franchises daily deals.
Let’s talk about those…
What is a special sales page daily deal?
Sales page promotion is this cool trick where if you have multiple games that have sold well, you can ask Valve for a “Franchise Sale” or “Publisher Sale.”
On the Steam backend, these special stales pages are really just Daily Deals and function the same: they take up one of the 4 daily slots. But when someone clicks on the thumbnail for the deal, the user is sent to a special custom page that you get to make instead of a single game. These are awesome because if you have a whole catalog you can sell EVEN MORE copies of even more games. Franchise Sales are why I say you should plan on making many games: more games mean you increase the total impact of these promotions.
In the following screenshot, today New Blood Interactive is doing this trick with their “Anniversary Sale.” You can see their special sales page here.
You can see other examples from 2024 here:
- Pinball FX franchise Sale
- RollerCoaster Tycoon 25th Anniversary Franchise Sale
- Cat Awareness Feline Sale
- Telltale Publisher Sale
I recorded 55 of these special deals during 2024.
What are the minimums to get a Daily Deal?
If you look at the official Steamworks Daily Deal documentation they say the minimum threshold to secure a daily deal is “sustainably reach tens of thousands of dollars in revenue per month.”
That means your game appears to earn around $120,000 per year. This is the number I always understood as the minimum gateway to enter “real Steam.”
But if we assume the average indie game costs $10, and there are about 30 purchases per review, a game would need 400+ reviews to earn $120,000.
But after digging deep into the 2024 data, I was actually a bit shocked by how low some of the review counts were for games are that got daily deals.
Here is a graph of every game that earned a Daily Deal since Jan, 20th, 2024:
Notice how many games got a Daily Deal that had fewer than 400 reviews. Those are games that most likely earned less than $120,000. To put it perspective, about 10% of games that got Daily Deals earned fewer than $120,000.
The smallest Daily Deal games
I even found 22 games that earned 100-ish reviews or fewer.
| Date of Daily Deal (DD) | Time on store before DD | Game | Number reviews at time of DD | Reviews today (February 2025) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-05-21 | 1 Day | Hole io | 21 | 111 |
| 2024-11-12 | 4 months | Jim is Moving Out! | 6 | 18 |
| 2024-12-18 | 10 YEARS! | Poker Superstars II | 15 | 16 |
| 2025-02-07 | 5 years | Dread Nautical | 18 | 30 |
| 2024-03-26 | 2 years | Block’Em! | 105 | 115 |
| 2024-12-08 | 6 months | Times and Galaxy | 44 | 49 |
| 2025-01-23 | 4 months | Dark Sky | 53 | 62 |
| 2024-04-02 | 2 years | Chenso Club | 256 | 300 |
| 2024-11-03 | 6 months | Tennis Manager 2024 | 80 | 98 |
| 2025-02-15 | 2 years | Desta: The Memories Between | 75 | 87 |
| 2024-06-21 | 6 months | Fossilfuel 2 | 67 | 125 |
| 2025-01-28 | 5 months | Train Yard Builder | 70 | 88 |
| 2024-05-01 | 3 months | Tortuga – A Pirate’s Tale | 73 | 136 |
| 2024-10-29 | 3 years | Devilated | 113 | 195 |
| 2024-09-20 | 6 months | Death of a Wish | 129 | 143 |
| 2025-01-11 | 6 months | Coin Factory | 119 | 179 |
| 2025-01-31 | 3 years | Puzzline | 88 | 114 |
| 2024-11-24 | 5 months | FINAL SPIN | 113 | 230 |
| 2024-08-31 | 3 months | Vendir: Plague of Lies | 111 | 181 |
| 2024-08-20 | 4 months | Vertical Kingdom | 111 | 122 |
| 2024-05-27 | 9 months | SUPER BOMBERMAN R 2 | 129 | 164 |
| 2025-02-03 | 9 months | Baladins | 145 | 149 |
What is going on here?
Although I write about THE ALGORITHM a lot, some parts of Steam are actually curated. I bet some person at Valve had a gap in their Daily Deal schedule and they decided to pick some silly little game they kind of liked.
Sometimes miracles happen to lucky devs.
Note the counts in that table are TOTAL reviews across all languages. If you look these games up in Steam with your own personal account you will likely see fewer reviews because Valve filters out languages that are not yours. You must use one of the scraping tools like steam.db, vginsights, gamediscover.co to see full review counts.
Visibility isn’t the limiting factor
Ask any developer what they want and they will say “VISIBILITY!”
But look at that list of 22 games that got plucked out of obscurity and given the ultimate visibility: front page featuring for 24 hours.
Did it make them go viral?
Nope.
Remember how I said Among us got a Daily Deal, earned a bunch of wishlists, then at the next storewide sales converted those wishlists to sales. I went back and looked at how many reviews those 100-ish review games earned in the subsequent months… none of them blew up and ended up earning 1000 reviews I use as my unofficial benchmark of “making it.”
FINAL SPIN had the biggest improvement with a total gain of 117 reviews.
Compare that to games that got a Daily Deal in the more traditional range. On 2024-02-16 SYNTHETIK 2 got a daily deal when it had 1870 reviews. It gained 448 reviews after that and is now sitting at 2318 reviews.
Nova Lands got a daily deal in July 2024 and had 2135 reviews. Now it’s sitting at 2455 for a gain of 320 reviews.
For the most part, visibility isn’t the limiting factor. Games that have *the magic* sell better when the same visibility is given to them.
To look at it from another perspective, last week I wrote about the Discovery Queue and how almost every well marketed game will get 25,000 discovery queue views in each of the first two days of their launch. If the game converts viewers to buyers, the DQ gives them more impressions. If it doesn’t convert, visibility is cut to make room for other games. Given the same visibility, some games sell, some games don’t.
Today is the first day of Steam Next Fest. Valve has said that their new algorithm shows all games a certain amount of times in the first few days. After that, the highest converting games will get more featuring.
I see this all over Steam. Some games just have *the magic* and every time they are shown, they sell a ton. Sometimes, regardless of quality, or how artistically interesting they are, or how much the dev spent on the game, a game just doesn’t have that *it* factor… that special je ne sais quoi that makes a game sell.
The Steam algorithms are built to try out every game and if it doesn’t put up good numbers, the views are cut. In the eyes of Valve, there is no reason to keep showing a game that has a lower conversion rate than a game that sells much better.
Ask for a daily deal anyway
So, let’s say you didn’t earn 1000 reviews, you are nowhere near the ability to “sustainably reach tens of thousands of dollars in revenue per month.”
I averaged the sub-400 review games. 235 reviews. So, if you are somewhere in that range, ask for the Daily Deal anyway. Just open a support ticket. You have a 10% chance. Might as well try. (If you are reading this and work for Valve, I am sorry I am clogging your support lines, but it is in people’s best interest to at least try). But, you as the developer must calibrate expectations. A daily deal and front-page-featuring isn’t magically going to turn your game into a hit.
I talked to a developer who asked for a Daily Deal 3 months after launch when their game was in the 300 review range. The developer figured they were as good as they were going to be. They got it! However, the results they got were slightly lower than most Daily Deal results: $10,000-ish. But, that is great! You just gotta try. But please, if Valve doesn’t respond, don’t spam them any more. Accept that you just weren’t in the lucky 10%.
Action to take
If you are going to ask for a Daily Deal check out this post.