I have always wondered how to stay on the front page of Steam in Popular Upcoming / New & Trending the lontest. Launch on Weekends? Mondays? Seasonal Sales? January? December?
So I built a little script that every day scrapes Steam’s front page launch widgets and records what games appeared on them. Then I compiled the total output so I could count how long each game was on the list.
The daily scrape started on December 31st and it has been scraping away since.
January is over so I figure now is a good time to make sure the script is still working and look back at what happened this first month.
Here is widget by widget (except Top Sellers / Specials) the results of 30+ days of scraping.
The Winter Sale
The 2025/2026 Steam Winter sale ran from December 18, 2025, and runs through January 5, 2026. It takes over the whole Store, changes some widgets around and focuses most of the visibility on Steam games that released previously and sold well
It seems crazy to launch anything during the Winter Sale.
But let’s use data to see…
Popular upcoming
The Popular Upcoming tab has the lowest bar of entry. If you get somewhere around 5000-7000 wishlists your game is eligible to appear on it during the week of your release.
The more games that launch during the week, the faster your game will be pushed off. So more releases = shorter time on the list.
I generated the following chart from the scrape data. It is sorted by day of the week (Dec 31st on the left, Feb 16th on the right). Each blue bar is a different game and its placement is based on when it FIRST appeared on that widget. The higher the bar the more days it spent on that list.
So for instance Vital Shell is the left-most bar there. It was on Popular Upcoming on Dec 31st when I started the scrape. The game fell off the list on January 7th. That means it was on the list for 8 days. That was the longest I saw a game spend on Popular Upcoming.
Notice how long the games that were on Popular upcoming during the winter sale stayed there for the full week. Nobody was launching during the new year, so no games were getting pushed off Popular Upcoing (more on this below).
Also note how you can see longer duration spikes during Thursday/Friday because new games can’t launch over the weekend, so they aren’t pushed off as fast.
January Popular Upcoming Stats:
- Number of games that hit the list in January 2026: 163
- Average days on list: 2.1
- Median days on list: 1
- Max: 8 days.
Side note, my scraper was busted for “popular upcoming” from Jan 1 until Jan 7th because when I wrote the scraper the Winter sale was on and the tab name at the time was “Upcoming.” Then when the sale was over it switched to “Popular Upcoming” and I didn’t catch that for a week. So I missed out on 7 days of popular upcoming data.
New & Trending
This list works by listing all games that met a mysterious sales threshold sorted by release date. The threshold seems to be proportional to other games launching at the same time but my gut says $8000 in a couple days will get you on the list. As new games release that meet the threshold minimums older games get bumped further down the list. If a game dips in sales it can get kicked off the list, but if sales return, it reappears.
Think of it like a slide with a bunch of kids droping into it FIFO (First one on, first one off.) Of course to be like New & Trending, some kids have to fall off the side if they aren’t doing well.
IMPORTANT: NEW&TRENDING IS NOT A RANKED LIST OF WHAT IS SELLING THE BEST. People always make this mistake. They look at the following list and think OH MY GOD “Kitty Powers’ Matchmaker Makeover” is outselling Diablo 2?!? Nope, Kitty Powers just released right after it. It is ordered by release date with the oldest game on the bottom. Look at the dates under the price.
Here is the chart of the New & Trending history for January.
The interesting thing about this data is how much longer games can spend here and it isn’t just during the Winter Sale. You can release a game at almost any time in January and there is a chance it will stay on the list longer. In general N&T is much harder to reach so there is less competition to bump you off.
New & Trending stats:
- Number of games that hit the list in January 2026: 95
- Average days on list: 4.25
- Median days on list: 4
- Max: 14 days Quarantine Zone The Last Check which first hit the list on January 13th
Note: Creature Kitchen hit the list on Saturday? You can’t release on a Saturday right? Nothing wrong here. They actually launched on Friday, but didn’t hit N&T until Saturday. Neat idea for a game by the way and it is doing quite well:
New & Trending Free
New & Trending Free is a relatively new widget that works very similar to New & Trending but contains only free games and Demos.
Similar to New & Trending Paid there is some minimum threshold to get on the list and then you stay there as long as you maintain that minimum threshold and more games don’t release after you and bump you off the list. I haven’t done a deep statistical analysis but a few friendly indies told me they got on the list after their demo hit about 90 concurrent players. It’s hard!
Don’t read too much into that Jan 7 gap, My scraper script was drunk.
New & Trending free stats:
- Number of games that hit the list in January 2026: 87
- Average days on list: 6
- Median days: 4
- Max: 24 days (at least): How Many Dudes This game was just pinned to the front page for the Steam Winter Festival. It didn’t fall off the list until January 23rd. They launched the game before I even started scraping
Should you maximize for Popular upcoming or New & Trending?
Other than launching during the Winter sale, the longest you can realistically last on Popular Upcoming is 4 days. And the average is 1. This is because the barrier to entry of 7000 wishlists is fairly well known and developers are optimizing their marketing for it. New and Trending is much harder hit so there is less competition, fewer games on there.
Therefore, outside of Winter Sale launches, your best bet for Popular Upcoming is 8 days on the list and an average time of 2 days. But for New & Trending, you are looking at a best bet of 14 days with an average of 4 ish. Plus when you are on the list you are actually making money. New & Trending is harder to get on. Therefore if you think you can earn $8000 fast, optimize for New & Trending.
If you don’t think you can make that $8000-ish limit, then maximize for popular upcoming events and hope for the best once you release.
Should you launch during the Winter Sale?
If you can, yes. It seems like there aren’t many games launching at that time. You get more front page featuring. People are buying games like crazy because it is a sale and they might have some Steam Christmas money.
If you are launching a demo, the Winter Sale is an EXCELLENT time time launch. Nobody launches demos then. Simon over at Game Discover Co interviewed the team behind Cairn and they launched their demo during the 2024/2025 Winter Sale and were on the front page for a month and got 500k Steam demo downloads.
As the months continue and I scrape more data, we can see just how January compares to the other months. Maybe the Summer Sale has similar numbers? Who knows, stay subscribed to the newsletter.
Do the opposite of what you think you should do
I read a lot of indie ghost stories and old wives tales on Reddit. And they are almost all wrong. The funny thing is that so many indies are simultaneously wrong in the same direction that they from a collective action problem where they sabotag each other. Here are some examples:
- “That AAA game that releases next week is so big I need to delay my release by 2 weeks so I don’t get drowned out by them. (Wrong!)”
- “I just finished Steam Next Fest, so I have momentum! I should launch my game right after Steam Next Fest” (Wrong!)
- “I shouldn’t launch my game / demo during the seasonal sales because all the players will be so excited to buy and play the deeply discounted games they will ignore my game” (WRONG, see above).
The problem here is that all indies are scaring each other into the same direction. So they either leave giant gaps where no indie is brave enough to launch (AAA game launch, or Seasonal Sale) or they crowd each other out because they all release RIGHT after SNF because they “have momentum.”
You need to employ the George Costanza rule of doing the opposite.
Whether you are launching your full game, or a demo, it really makes sense to try and launch during the year-end holiday. Provided you leave time to be with your family.
You still need to make a good game
Yes you can min/max for the number of days on New & Trending or Popular upcoming but really in the end what matters most is to make a good game. Don’t make a bad game.
Past Fate timed its launch to have 8 popular upcoming days. It looks really cool. But after a month on the store it is sitting on a decent but not magical 74 reviews.
Backrooms Deluxe 2 finagled 13 days on the front page but are sitting at 400-ish MOSTLY NEGATIVE reviews.
Highguard spent 10 days on Trending Free and we all know how that went.
The opposite is true too. If something bad happens and you don’t make it on Popular Upcoming or New & Trending, it isn’t the end of the world. I don’t think it is the reason your release didn’t succeed. Featuring is just a nice boost Valve gives you.
This is why I don’t think “exposure” is the limiting metric on Steam. Valve shows most new games to a very representative sample of players. If the algorithm doesn’t see enough revenue in proportion to that exposure, it will bury your game. It isn’t exposure, it is how fun, exciting, buzzy, word-of-mouthy your game is.
So please, I am begging you, make a good game.
Who is the God-lord-amen of the front page of Steam?
Here are the games that spent the absolute most time (so far) on the front page of Steam.
Note that some of these games were on the lists before I started my scrape so they could have even longer times.
[54 DAYS ] Where Winds Meet this game pulled off the Hattrick Trifecta. It is a free game that launched on December 31st. So it was on Popular Upcoming, Trending Free, and Top Sellers all at the same time. So I guess technically it didn’t spend 54 days like a mythical man month. It really was on the front page from December 31st through December 7th.
[24 DAYS] DRAGON QUEST VII Reimagined – Again, not an indie game but interesting because they also hit the hattrick trifecta 3 lists.Here is there schedule
- 2026-01-08 – Trending Free (Demo Launch) (17 days)
- 2026-02-05 – Popular Upcoming (1 day)
- 2026-02-06 – Popular New Releases (6 days)
[24 DAYS] How Many Dudes launched their demo on Dec 17th and hit Trending Free Soon after. Again I don’t have those stats, but recorded stats put them at 24 days. You can watch the developers Butterscotch Shenanigans deconstruct the results here on their podcast
[23 DAYS] CivIdle is a Free Idle game that was released Dec 4, 2025 (pre scrape). But recorded data says 23 days.
What does it look like to be on the front page?
I reached out to Butterscotch Shenanigans (subscribe to their podcast by the way) and this is what the traffic looks like when you are on one of those featured widgets. The light blue line is Home page (the Trending Free List). The brown bar is other assorted home page traffic (I think the various Featured & Recommended widgets at the top).
“We wanted to get our demo for HMD out ahead of the Winter Holiday because not many games were going to be launching during that window, so we figured it might be easier to get players on Steam and content creators to check it out. We’re also doing the February Nextfest, so wanted to get the demo out early to fix any potential issues.
We were already happy on Day 4 when we’d hit around 400 peak ccu and median demo playtime over the 1hr benchmark we’d set. But then it just kept going – driven by an insane amount of content creator pick-up. Each day we were like “surely this is it… RIGHT?!” but it didn’t peak until January 6th (at 3306 ccu!).
All that traffic then got us into the Discovery Queue right about that time, and that lasted until we got a localized Demo update out with Chinese and other language support on January 23rd, which kicked off a fresh wave of traffic and wishlists. We had 8,387 wishlists on December 18th. By January 31st we had 150,292 – and the demo’s median playtime is over 2 hours. It’s now been downloaded 366,064 times. This shattered every expectation we had. Might be a once-in-a-lifetime sorta thing.”
The combination of youtuber coverage and front page featuring triggered the Discovery Queue which REALLY brought in the traffic (the purple line).
But store page featuring is only one piece. The front page visibility also lead to content creators covering How Many Dudes. Search suggestions (yellow green in chart below) is usually attributed to content creators because people search the games name after watching the video.
