The Steam sale calendar, and how to plan a launch around it

On 17 December 2025, the day before Steam's Winter Sale opened, a small game called How Many Dudes put up its demo. Conventional advice says that is exactly the wrong week: the front page belongs to discounts, and players are buying games they already know. By 31 January the game had gone from 8,387 wishlists to 150,292, according to figures Chris Zukowski published in February 2026.

The reason is supply, not demand. Most developers avoid the sale weeks, so the lists Steam uses for new and upcoming games, Popular Upcoming and New & Trending, have fewer entrants and turn over more slowly. A game that would last a day on Popular Upcoming in an ordinary week can sit there for a week.

That does not make every sale week a good launch week. It means the calendar is a set of trade-offs, not a list of dates to avoid, and the trade-offs come from Valve's discount rules more than from the crowd. This guide lists every published date through mid-2027, the rules that decide which ones your game can use, and how to place a launch among them.

Valve publishes its event calendar on the Upcoming Steam Events page in Steamworks. The four seasonal sales are open to any released game; Next Fest is for unreleased games with a demo; the themed fests are open to released games, Coming Soon games and games with demos, with discounted games prioritised. Read on 18 October 2026:

Four rules in Valve's discounting documentation shape every launch plan. They apply to Early Access releases exactly as to full releases.

• No discount for 30 days after release. The one exception is the launch discount, which you set before release.
• A seasonal sale needs 30 days of release. Valve's wording: any game released at least 30 days before the event start date is welcome to participate.
• 30 days between discounts, and 30 days after a price increase in any currency. Seasonal sales are exempt from the gap between discounts, so a weeklong deal shortly before or after one does not block it. They are not exempt from the release and price-increase cooldowns.
• Discounts run 10% to 95%, for 1 to 14 days. A launch discount runs 10% to 40%, for 7 to 14 days; Valve suggests about 10% to 15%.

One more rule is the reason a discount matters at all: a discount of 20% or more sends an email to everyone who has the game on their wishlist. A 15% launch discount is a gentle nudge to buyers who are already on the page. A 20% discount is a message in every wishlister's inbox.

If you want a seasonal sale as your second wave of sales, count 30 days back from its first day. Release later than that and the sale runs without you, and the next one is three months away.

Next Fest is the event most likely to catch a first-time developer out, because its deadlines fall weeks before the week itself, and a game can enter only one edition. Valve's page for the February 2027 edition lists:

• 8 December 2026: a live Q&A for developers, 10 to 11 a.m. Pacific.
• 10 January 2027, 11:59 p.m. Pacific: registration closes.
• 18 January: Valve pulls trailers for its official Next Fest trailer, from the base game's store page.
• 25 January: the demo build and store page should be in review if you want the demo live for the Press Preview.
• 8 February: everything required must be submitted for review.
• 11 February, 10 a.m. Pacific: the Press Preview opens, and the last day to opt your trailer out of Valve's marketing.
• 22 February to 1 March, 10 a.m. Pacific: the fest, with the wrap-up page of the most-played demos launching on 1 March.

Valve has not yet published the June 2027 edition's page. Its general workback, counted from the 14 June start, puts the Press Preview submission around 10 May, everything in review by 24 May and the Press Preview on 3 June. Check the edition's own page in Steamworks when it appears. The Next Fest sign-up guide walks through the registration itself.

Zukowski scraped Steam's launch widgets every day through January 2026 and published the results on How To Market A Game. Popular Upcoming, the list of unreleased games about to launch, took somewhere around 5,000 to 7,000 wishlists to enter. 163 games reached it that month, and the median stay was one day; the average was 2.1. The longest was eight days, by a game that entered on 31 December, inside the Winter Sale, when few other games were launching to push it off. Outside the sale, about four days was the realistic best.

New & Trending, the list of recent releases, was harder to reach and kept games longer: 95 games, a median of four days, a best case of fourteen.

Where this breaks: the data is one month, and placement is not success. Zukowski's own conclusion is that the front page amplifies a game players already like; games with weak reviews held the lists for days and still sold little. And a game that launches inside a sale cannot join that sale, because it is in its 30-day release cooldown. Its only discount that week is its own launch discount, shown beside thousands of deeper ones.

So the honest summary is: launching in a sale week buys visibility on the launch lists at the cost of the discount comparison. That trade is good for a game whose page converts at full price, and bad for one that needs a discount to get noticed.

1. Pick the season, then the week. Decide which seasonal sale should be your second wave and count back 30 days for your latest release day.
2. Keep the launch out of Next Fest weeks unless your game is in the fest. For seven days the front page is given to thousands of demos.
3. Check your genre's themed fest. A themed fest in your genre a few weeks after launch is a free second showing; one in the launch week puts you among every discounted game in your genre.
4. Look for big launches in your genre on SteamDB's upcoming list and avoid their week. They pull the same players and push you off the same tags.
5. Count back the store page. The store page must be live as Coming Soon for at least two weeks before release, and Valve asks for it in review well before that. In practice, wishlists come from months of Coming Soon, not two weeks.
6. Decide the launch discount before release. It cannot be added afterwards. A 10% to 15% launch discount is Valve's suggestion; deeper launch discounts trade revenue for little reach, because the wishlist email only fires at 20% and above, and 20% to 40% at launch undercuts every full-price buyer.
7. Plan the first real discount. Thirty days after release you can run a weeklong deal, which starts on a Monday at 10 a.m. Pacific and runs seven days. At 20% or more it emails every wishlister, which is the main reason to run one.

Our marketing timeline tool does the counting from a release date and lays these events on top.

Beyond the self-serve weeklong deals, Valve selects games for Daily Deals (24 hours on the front page, at least two slots a day), Midweek Madness (72 hours, up to six slots a week) and Weekend Deals (96 hours, up to six slots a week). The Midweek and Weekend slots need custom artwork, and a game generally gets a curated slot about once a calendar year, at least three months apart.

Valve's own advice on discounting is to deepen discounts gradually, to schedule them alongside content updates, and to read your sales curve before cutting the price while many full-price buyers remain. It also says plainly that no one should feel pressured to move a release date or a price change for the sake of a seasonal sale: there is always another one.

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