Steam Sale Starts Today as Valve Ends Its Curated Deal Era

Steam's Autumn Sale begins today, and the week-long Steam sale runs through October 8, with discounts across every category on the PC storefront. The storefront refreshes at 10 AM Pacific, which is 1 PM Eastern.

The timing lands at the start of Halloween season. Valve's announcement for the Steam sale links directly to its horror category, according to coverage from GG.deals. The site also reported that Valve prepared a Steam sale trailer revealing some of the featured games, including Sid Meier's Civilization VII, Palworld, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Dune: Awakening, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, inZOI, Paralives, and LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight. The trailer gives only a taste of the sale, with many more games expected to appear at reduced prices.

The Steam sale is one of four seasonal events on Steam, and it is shorter than the Summer and Winter events. That makes the timing matter for shoppers: there is a week to browse before prices go back up, and 2026 has been an expensive year for PC gaming. GamesRadar described 2026 as one of the priciest years in recent memory for PC gamers, which makes the seasonal sales a bigger deal for anyone watching a backlog.

Valve's curated deal era is ending

The Steam sale arrives days after Valve announced a major change to how discounts work on Steam. On September 29, the company said its Discounts and Events section will move to fully personalized algorithmic recommendations in early 2027, reported by TechTimes. Valve has already paused scheduling new curated placements, though developers with existing deals booked will keep their slots.

For more than a decade, Valve staff hand-picked a small roster of titles each week for Daily Deals, Midweek Deals, and Weekend Deals. Getting one of those slots was among the most coveted outcomes in PC game publishing, putting a game in front of a storefront with a 130-million-plus active user base alongside custom promotional artwork and steep discounts. Valve selected games based on its assessment of sales momentum, review counts, and platform health, and slots were generally limited to once per year per title.

Valve's test of the new system produced striking results. The company reported surfacing ten times more games per day in the Discounts and Events section during testing, with meaningful increases in store page visits, wishlists, and cart additions. Tim Bender, chief executive of publisher Hooded Horse, analyzed traffic for an unnamed indie title and found it had received 14 visits from the section in the five months before the algorithmic shift, then 7,341 visits in the single month after. "This change took a source of traffic that was non-existent for niche indies," Bender wrote, "and suddenly made it the best source of traffic in the entire store."

Valve's stated rationale is that developers should focus on crafting compelling games and deals rather than spending time trying to convince someone at the company to feature their products. Under the new system, placement during a Steam sale will be computed from each shopper's behavior rather than chosen by staff. The new system uses collaborative filtering: it builds a model of each user's preferences from purchase history, wishlist activity, and the behavior of users with similar tastes, then matches discounted games to the users most likely to buy them. Two players browsing the store during a sale can see entirely different sets of featured games.

There is a catch. Collaborative filtering needs behavioral data to function, so a game with no purchases, no wishlists, and no engagement history has nothing for the algorithm to match against. A Steam sale appearance in the new system will favor the games the data already knows. That makes Steam Next Fest, the platform's recurring demo showcase running October 19 through October 26, even more significant for developers, since a strong showing builds the wishlists and playtime data the new system feeds on.

What to watch during the sale

What stays the same is the Steam sale calendar itself. Valve published its promotional event calendar through the Summer Sale ending in July of the following year, and the big seasonal events keep their dates. After the Autumn Sale wraps, the calendar continues with Cooking Fest from October 12 to October 19, Steam Next Fest, and the Steam Scream V Fest from October 26 to November 2. The Winter Sale then runs December 17 through January 4.

For shoppers, the practical move is the same as every Steam sale: check the wishlist, because the platform flags which games on it have dropped in price. Themed fests between the big sales also offer a discovery window for specific genres. And for developers, the message from Valve is to stop lobbying for calendar slots and start paying attention to the game's metadata, since the store's tags are what the recommendation engine uses to match games to players. Valve also said new and updated developer tools for managing discounts are on the way, with full transition timing to be confirmed in the coming weeks.

Today's Steam sale is one of the last big seasonal events under the old model, where the front page of discounts was chosen by people at Valve rather than computed for each shopper. Starting early next year, the Steam sale experience will look different for everyone.

Also this week in tech: Apple's smart home hub leads October's triple launch, and the Honor Life S3 e-ink reader that snaps to a phone.