How to plan your first Steam sale

GameDiscoverCo looked at games released between September 2024 and September 2025 with more than 25,000 wishlists at launch. The median sold 0.15 copies in its first week for every wishlist: about 15,000 sales per 100,000 wishlists, counting buyers who had never wishlisted it. For games priced above $10, the median was 0.10.

Read that the other way round and it is the case for planning your first sale. At least 85% of the people who wishlisted the median game did not buy it in launch week. They are still on the list, Steam will email them when the game is discounted by 20% or more, and the first discount is the moment that waiting demand turns into sales. It deserves the planning of a launch, not the afterthought of a coupon.

• Not before day 30. No discount within 30 days of release, Early Access included, and not within 30 days after the launch discount ends.
• 30 days between discounts, and 30 days after any price increase in any currency.
• Seasonal sales need 30 days of release. The game must have released at least 30 days before the sale starts. Seasonal sales are exempt from the between-discounts cooldown, so a weeklong deal shortly before or after one does not block it.
• Themed fests are not exempt. A discount in a fest counts towards the 30-day cooldown like any other.
• Wishlist emails have their own two-week cooldown per app, so two discounts close together do not both email your wishlisters.

Four options, in rough order of reach for most indie games:

Three numbers set the depth of a first sale:

• 20% is the floor that matters, because a discount of 20% or more emails everyone who has the game on their wishlist. A 15% sale is invisible to the people most likely to buy.
• Your launch discount. A first sale only needs to beat the launch price players saw. If the launch discount was 10% to 15%, 20% to 25% reads as a real deal.
• Your next sale. Valve's own advice is to deepen discounts gradually over time rather than jumping straight to deep cuts. Every sale sets the floor the next one has to beat, so a first sale of 50% leaves nowhere to go.

A common first-year path is 20% to 25% at the first sale, around a third off in the following seasonal sales, and deeper only after the game's first anniversary or a major update. Valve's limits are 10% to 95%, for 1 to 14 days.

A game's store page shows no score until it has ten reviews from Steam purchasers. A sale with a visible, positive score converts far better than one with none, and reviews in the first week are a large part of how the launch went. GameDiscoverCo's underperformers had a median first-week user score of 67% (Mixed), against 91% (Very Positive) for the games that did well.

Ask for reviews at the right moments: on the game's end screen or after a satisfying milestone, in launch posts, and in update notes. Reviews from Steam keys activated outside Steam do not count towards the score. Reply to negative reviews with what you fixed; a developer response is read by every future buyer.

Valve advises scheduling discounts alongside content updates, and the reason is simple: a sale says the price fell; an update says the game got better. Together they give a wishlister two reasons to look again. Post the update as a store-page event in the days before the sale, so the page a returning player lands on shows a living game with a fresh changelog.

1. Day 0: release with a 10% to 15% launch discount for 7 to 14 days. Steam emails your wishlisters.
2. Week 1: ship the first patch; reply to every review; ask for reviews in the game and your posts.
3. Weeks 2 to 4: ship a meaningful update and announce it on the store page. No discounts are allowed yet.
4. Day 30 onwards: check which seasonal sale or fitting themed fest comes next, and that the game released at least 30 days before it.
5. First sale: 20% to 25%, joined through Discount Management, with a store-page post and an update just before it.
6. After it: read the sales and activation reports against the wishlist report, and set the next sale's depth from what moved.

Our Steam sale calendar has every seasonal sale and themed fest through June 2027.

A gradual discount ladder assumes the game's audience is still growing and its wishlists are still being added. For a game whose launch went quietly, with few wishlists and little traffic, a 20% sale emails few people, and the honest fix is more reach, through creators, a festival or a major update, not a deeper cut. And for a game priced at $4.99, the gap between 20% and 50% is a dollar and a half; depth matters less than being in the right sale at all.

Flockbay is a free AI game builder on the official Godot engine. It drafts your sale announcement and update posts, cuts clips from your real gameplay for the week, and posts to TikTok; its Steam numbers read your followers and wishlists so you can see what the sale moved. The Steam numbers are free; the other publishing tools are free in beta until 1 December 2026. Discounts are set by you in Steamworks.