More changes are coming to the way you buy games on Steam.
"Our goal with Steam’s discovery features is to show the right game to the right customer, so we spent the last few months experimenting with replacing some curated spots with dynamic and personalized recommendations. By featuring games in a more personalized way in the Discounts & Events section, we were able to show 10x more games to customers in a given day in that section. As a result, we saw meaningful increases in store page visits, wishlists, and cart additions."
WHAT IT MEANS
Steam's Discounts and Events page is, as the name suggests, basically a collection of discounted games and special events: The Nier Franchise Sale, Game Devs of Color Expo, some lifts from your wishlist, and some that just match up with stuff you've done in the past. But all of them are "curated placements," which means they're scheduled by either developers or publishers themselves, or by Steam.
But Steam, as we all know, is always looking to refine the online game shopping experience, which is where these "dynamic and personalized" recommendations come in: "More discounted games or sale events 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 continues: "We have confidence this approach is better aligned with our goal, and results in a better experience for customers and developers. The constraint of 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."
There was a bit of early confusion about what exactly Valve is doing here, and concerns that Valve would be pursuing the practice of dynamic pricing—that is, adjusting prices on the fly to reflect the demands of the moment. But it's the recommendations that are going dynamic, not the prices, so—assuming there are no unpleasant surprises in store—it's what you'll see that will be changing, not what you'll pay.
SEEMS FINE THEN?
At this early stage, yeah. Look, I'm a little tired of dancing to the tune of algorithms, and I wonder too if some people won't wind up missing out on cool stuff that maybe falls outside their usual areas of interest if they're only presented with what Steam knows they're likely to buy.
On the whole, though—and acknowledging that we don't have any details on how it will actually work just yet—it seems fine to me. Finding visibility on Steam is a never-ending challenge for indie developers, and if this puts more games in front of more eyeballs, it's hard not to see it as at least a small win.
None of this will be happening for a while, to be clear: A hard rollout date hasn't been set but Valve expects to start the process in early 2027.
