Valve is killing Steam's curated deals calendar and handing the slots to an algorithm

Weekend Deals, Midweek Deals and Daily Deals have been part of Steam's furniture for years: a small set of slots, filled by hand either by developers booking them through Steamworks or by Valve's own store team. Valve announced on September 29 that the whole arrangement is going away in early 2027, replaced by recommendations picked for each individual shopper.

What Valve said

The company describes it as a move "away from a manual calendar-based approach and into something more dynamic and personalized for each customer," and argues the fixed slot count was the problem: dropping it means "more discounted games or sale events will have the chance to be visible on the homepage and elsewhere on Steam."

Valve says it has been testing this for months by swapping some curated spots for personalised picks. The result, by its own numbers, was showing "10x more games to customers in a given day in that section," with what it calls meaningful increases in store page visits, wishlists and cart additions. It also concedes the new system will not "be perfect right away."

It has already started

Valve has paused scheduling new curated placements for Weekend, Midweek and Daily Deals. Anything already booked will still run, and developers with a slot don't need to do anything. There is no firm switchover date yet, with Valve promising more clarity "in the upcoming weeks" and new developer tools for managing discounts and sale events alongside the change.

One line in the announcement reads like a mission statement for the whole thing: Valve wants developers to spend their time on good games and good deals "and not spend time trying to convince someone at Valve to feature their products."

The early evidence

According to Game Developer, GameDiscoverCo's Simon Carless spotted the personalised placements earlier in September and read them as a quiet win for small studios. Hooded Horse chief executive Tim Bender said on LinkedIn that one of the publisher's games pulled more than 7,000 store page visits from the section in a single month, against 7,355 across the previous six - traffic he described as previously non-existent for niche indies.

Why it matters

For players, the front page's deals stop being one shared shop window and become yours specifically, which cuts both ways: more chance of finding something obscure you'd actually buy, less chance of stumbling onto something outside your habits. For developers, a slot you could once ask Valve for becomes something only the algorithm can grant.