Valve will retire Steam's Weekend, Midweek and Daily Deals, and has paused scheduling them
Valve is retiring the curated deal slots on Steam, and the booking window shut ahead of it. In a Steamworks announcement on September 29, Valve told developers it expects to "fully cease using a curated calendar for the Discounts & Events Section" in early 2027, and that "in the meantime, we have paused scheduling curated placements in that section (Weekend Deals, Midweek Deals, and Daily Deals)".
Half-Life: Alyx on Steam. Valve's change applies to every game on the store, with no genre or platform named. Image: Valve
Anything a studio has booked still runs. Valve says a Weekend, Midweek or Daily Deal that is scheduled "will be honored and you don’t need to take any action", so the slots empty out as the calendar runs down rather than vanishing on a date.
Valve says personalisation showed 10x more games
The reasoning Valve gives is a number from its own testing. Replacing some curated spots with dynamic, personalised recommendations let Steam "show 10x more games to customers in a given day in that section", Valve says, and it saw "meaningful increases in store page visits, wishlists, and cart additions". No figure is attached to those increases.
The argument behind it is that a fixed calendar cannot keep up with the catalogue. More discounted games "will have the chance to be visible on the homepage and elsewhere on Steam, rather than be limited by a small, fixed number of slots", Valve writes, and a manually managed calendar "doesn’t make as much sense with such diverse customer tastes and so many relevant deals for customers available at any given time".
What changes for a developer
Nothing in the post is VR-specific. Valve names no genre, no platform and no headset, and the change lands on every game on Steam in the same way, so a VR studio’s discounts will compete for the same personalised slots as everything else on the store.
Valve describes the Discounts & Events section as made up of curated placements "that are either scheduled directly by partners via Steamworks, or by us here on the Steam team". Both routes are going.
For a developer the effect is immediate. A Weekend Deal was booked through Steamworks against a fixed calendar, and until the replacement arrives there is nothing to book: which discounted games a shopper sees is decided by Steam’s recommendation system instead. Valve puts that in developer terms, saying its goal is to let studios "focus on crafting the most compelling games and deals for customers, and not spend time trying to convince someone at Valve to feature their products".
Valve promises "new and updated tools" for managing discounts and sale events alongside the change, and its discount documentation still carries the current rules. There is no launch date. Valve says it does not have "a definite date for implementing these changes" and is "still tuning the details", with more clarity on timing "in the upcoming weeks".
Seasonal sales and fests carry on
Only the curated placements inside Discounts & Events are going. The Steam Autumn Sale that opened on October 1 and runs to October 8 is untouched, and so is the Next Fest that opens on October 19. Valve’s published events calendar still lists Cooking Fest from October 12, Steam Scream V Fest from October 26 and the Winter Sale from December 17.
Early 2027 is as precise as Valve gets, and the wording is Valve’s own. Until the new system lands, the deal slots on the books now are the last ones that will be booked.
