Revealed: why Steam's new Daily Deal system might help you!

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[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

Welcome to a new week, folks! We’re putting out a slightly truncated newsletter today (officially a U.S. holiday), because of an interesting new Steam beta feature that we’re excited to tell you about. (We’re all about ‘platform updates’, here…)

Before we start, we’ve been talking a lot about localization recently, but Terry Cavanagh (Dicey Dungeons) is still wielding ‘niche localization’ as an inclusivity feature for ‘rarer’ languages. His latest VVVVVV patch? 21 new languages, including Arabic & Turkish, sure, but also - wait for it - Catalan, Welsh, Silesian, and even Esperanto.

[PSA: yes, you can support GameDiscoverCo by subscribing to GDCo Plus now. You get full access to a super-detailed Steam data site for unreleased & released games, weekly PC/console sales research, Discord access, seven detailed game discovery eBooks - & lots more.]

Steam’s new Daily Deal system: how it’s working..

Eagle-eyed PC game publishers & devs may have spotted a new option in the back end of the Steamworks tool last week under Apps & Packages, ‘Daily Deal Management’. (It goes just next to ‘Discount Management’.) What is it?

For those who don’t know, Daily Deal is a front-page ‘curated’ feature, defined as a feature which is “earned with player interest” by Steam’s official ‘visibility explainer’ video - which you should definitely watch. Wha happen? Your (discounted) game appears on the Steam store front-page to all for 24 hours. It’s pretty pretty good.

Well, Valve just rolled out a FAQ page(dev login required) on this new ‘Self-Schedule (Beta)’ option, saying: “The ability for a developer/publisher to schedule their Daily Deal on the calendar is now in beta. If a game has been determined that it is eligible for a Daily Deal, Valve will send an invite to [opted-in dev/pub] contacts for that game.” Interesting, huh?

We had chance to look at this screen, and also informally check with Valve on a couple of things. And here’s how this shakes out:

• Valve has added a ‘push’ email to devs if you can have a Daily Deal: if your game is ‘eligible’ (more on this later!), you’ll get an email, and can go to this new Daily Deal page and pick a day for your game to get this primo visiblity. (Previously, you would pretty much only get a Daily Deal if you asked.)

• Daily Deal games will - as before - get a big discovery boost for 24 hours: as Valve explains “Visibility on the Steam homepage and applicable tag pages runs for 24 hours [starting at 10am PT], while the discount will be active for between 7 and 14 days depending on the discount length you selected.”

• You have to pick your Daily Deal date within 30 days, or it expires: one important part of this is that you need to pay attention to your emails. After 30 days, your Daily Deal invite - which lets you set any free date in the next 6 months for that game’s DD - will expire.

Look, overall we think this is pretty cool. Previously, information asymmetry - people not even knowing to ask about Daily Deals or other curated Steam features - disadvantaged some devs. Now, it's much fairer, easier to use, and more open to all.

On the other hand, if you were ‘on top’ of this and good at working with Valve on featured games, you may not do quite as well. We’ll see, huh? Anyhow, three other points we thought it was worth highlighting:

• You still need to provide a ‘record’ discount in order to be a Daily Deal: this has always been the case, just manually negotiated. But Valve’s official syntax on this: “We ask that you pick a discount % that is at least as good as the best discount you have run in the past, if not better.”

• This system isn’t ‘replacing’ asking Valve for featuring: just because there’s now a system ‘pushing’ Daily Deal offers, you shouldn’t stop proactively asking the platform, for two reasons: a) Steam is still refining the invitation system b) other curated discounts like Midweek Deals & Weekend Deals aren’t part of this system.

• There may be more Daily Deals, going forward: this one is a little ‘vague’, since the official documentation already says “there are two or more Daily Deal slots per day”. But practically, it seemed to be 1-2 on most days, before. And now, we believe it may be as many as four. (Depending on who signs up for which days!)

Eligibility for Daily Deals: how does Steam pick?

Before you go on about your day, there’s one other key point we wanted to cover. There’s a new SteamWorks docs section on Daily Deal eligibility(may be English language only for now?) that it’s worth both quoting and commenting on:

"Since Daily Deals appear prominently in the Steam Store and are visible to broad swaths of customers, we need to have confidence that these offers will be interesting to a broad set of customers. Therefore, we judge eligibility for daily deals based on demonstrated customer interest or trending momentum in revenue over the past few months.

The threshold shifts over time based on how many games are demonstrating strong revenue, but typically the games that qualify have hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue over the past few months.

This also assumes that the game is ready to run a compelling discount, and may be adjusted if there are other factors in play such as a planned major update, a new discount depth, a launch of a DLC, or the release of the game into 1.0.”

This statement generated some discussion in GameDiscoverCo Plus Discord, because - yes, it is a little bit ‘rich get richer’. You have to be somewhat popular to get a Daily Deal, and there’s no direct space for a) ‘somebody at Valve loves your game so they will feature it editorially’ or b) any ‘Hidden Gems’-like algorithm approach to featuring.

However, this is very much in step with the fact that Valve has never believed in ‘editorial featuring’ - or ads in their platform, or a relationship-based curatorial approach to content. That’s the point: it’s not who you know, it’s how you perform.

Still, there’s some flexibility built in (see ‘other factors in play’). And in our view, this performance-based approach is one of the reasons that the Steam market is so dynamic and interesting compared to other platforms, some of which (ahem, ‘Switch eShop x discounting’) are incenting very much the wrong dev discoverability behaviors.

The game discovery news round-up…

OK, as we wander to take the rest of the day off, we’ll just crunch through some notable platform and discovery news which appeared since late last week:

• The 26th Independent Games Festival announced its finalists, with Indian x Canadian narrative cooking game Venba(above) leading the way with four nominations, and Grand Prize noms including 1000xRESIST, A Highland Song, Anthology of the Killer, COCOON, and Mediterranea Inferno. (Intriguing!)

• A correction on that Ayaneo Steam Deck-a-like that we thought was shipping with SteamOS: “It will not ship with official SteamOS support, but rather come with an optimized version of HoloISO, a SteamOS clone not by Valve.” (Valve is open to providing SteamOS to third-parties, but hasn’t got around to repackaging it yet?)

• We’ve been saying this for a while now (not that any of us can do much about it!), so interesting to see Nacon’s head of publishing tell GI.biz: “There are too many games currently on the market… We're seeing releases that are without a day one, to use the old retail expression, without any exposure of a title that has been properly marketed.”

• A number of physical Switch games are out of stock at major retailers, sparking rumors that“a Nintendo Selects-style repackaging of these titles might be imminent ahead of the rumored Switch successor.” Possibly to include the name of that console on the box, if ‘Switch 2’ is backwards compatible. Makes sense, right?

• PlayStation’s most-downloaded games of December have been revealed by them, with Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare III holding the top spot on PS5 (and PS4 in North America), and The Finals making an impressive debut in F2P game downloads - #2 in the U.S./Canada, even beating out Roblox, and #3 in Europe.

• In a surprise move, UK physical game retailer GAME will no longer allow customers to trade in physical video games from next month, according to staff. We always thought this was a high-margin business for companies like GameStop - but as game stores pivot to toys/collectibles, maybe it’s too complex to deal with?

• The solo dev of VR game Eye Of The Templehas done a 2023 retrospective, revealing that it’s profitable based on ‘paying self last salary’ metrics since its 2023 launch on Quest 2/3: “70% of total revenue has come from Quest and 30% from Steam, with the Quest version having been out for a shorter time”. But as the Quest store fills up, it was below 2021-2022 launch levels, where allegedly: “Quest sales could commonly be 5x-10x as large as Steam VR sales.”

• The 27th annual D.I.C.E. Awards finalists are upon us, and: “Topping the list with an impressive 9 nominations [is] Marvel’s Spider-Man 2”, followed by Alan Wake 2 (8 noms). Baldur’s Gate 3 (7), and Cocoon (6). Game Of The Year nominees are these four games, plus the wondrous Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, btw.

• Ampere Analysis is estimating console publisher MAU on Xbox and PlayStation, documenting Epic’s big win in Dec: “console gamers spent more time in Fortnite than in Call of Duty HQ, EA Sports FC 24, Grand Theft Auto V/Online, and Roblox combined; more than 1.6bn total hours.” (We’ll see where it normalizes, post-Big Bang comedown? But right now, GameDiscoverCo still sees Fortnite DAU as a) #1 across PS/Xbox and b) 2.6x the DAU of the #2 game, EA Sports FC. Hot.)

• Stumble Guys - Scopely’s Fall Guys ‘fast follow’ which started as a Photon Engine experiment with Kitka Games re: making real-time mobile multiplayer - is now arriving on Xbox in a week or so. And fascinatingly, it will also debut on Xbox One as well as Xbox Series. (This is the ‘low spec Android’ equivalent, rite?)

Finally, excellent YouTube video essayist Errant Signal has done a piece on (per a YT commenter) “the ‘horror and tension -> laughing to release tension’ gameplay loop that makes Lethal Company such an outstanding and well-designed game.” Check it out:

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an agency based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide consulting services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]