Valve could be prepping to roll out 30-day Steam price tracking in the US, making it harder for publishers to mess with discounts

If you've ever seen a Steam game reduced by 90% and wondered if that's the real discount, Valve may have you covered. Recent files in the Steam database imply it might be working on the wider rollout of a tracking system that bases the discount percentage on the lowest price in 30 days.

Found by user @SigaTbh, and posted by LambdaGeneration, a recent analysis of code found on SteamDB shows tags like "30-Day low" and 'this game was previously on discount for x% within the past y days." (via Tom's Hardware)

These are potential templates that could display over games to inform the user of its price history in the last month. Up until now, in the US, if you have spotted a game on sale, it can be quite hard to tell if the deal is actually a deal. Publishers and developers can theoretically put their prices up just before a sales event, then bring them back down again, suggesting the sale is a bigger discount than it actually is.

The downside here is that, with a 30-day price tracking window, one can still use Steam's pricing system to make games seem more discounted than they are; they just need to avoid doing it for a few weeks before major sales events.

Naturally, just because Valve appears to have added this functionality doesn't mean it will make it into the live build of Steam. It could simply be something Valve has been toying with in the back-end.

As pointed out over on the Steam subreddit, this feature does exist on Steam in some EU countries, but the recent find could signal a worldwide rollout of the function. In my book, anything that makes Steam pricing clearer is a good thing. We even wished for a price tracking feature at the start of 2026.

This is not the only neat feature we've seen from Valve recently. Just last week, it was reportedly testing a system that could give frame rate estimates for games, based on reports from people with similar rigs.

For now, if you don't live in a country with the option to check the historic price of games via Steam, you can still do so via SteamDB. It includes a price history for every game, so you can simply find it on there. This is an inelegant solution, as checking a third-party site for every sale is a tad inefficient, but it's still a decent way to know if sales are actually sales.

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