Valve will retire manual curation of the Steam "Discounts and Events" section and hand placement over to personalization algorithms, with the rollout planned for early 2027.

The company announced the change publicly after analyst Simon Carless of GameDiscoverCo flagged the revamp earlier. In its announcement, Valve explained that the promotions currently showcased in the section are devised in advance either by publishers and developers or by the Steam team itself. Going forward, algorithmic selection based on individual player preferences will replace that manually managed calendar.

For developers and publishers, the shift removes a pipeline built around pitching and scheduling placement in curated seasonal collections. Instead, visibility in the discounts section will depend on how well a discounted title matches what individual users already play, wishlist and buy. Valve expects users will more frequently see discounts on games that genuinely interest them.

"We have confidence this approach is better aligned with our goal, and results in a better experience for customers and developers," Valve said in the announcement. "The constraint of a manually managed calendar doesn't make as much sense with such diverse customer tastes and so many relevant deals for customers available at any given time."

The decision is backed by live experiment data rather than speculation. Valve admitted it has periodically swapped curated collections of discounted games with personalized ones over recent months. During those tests, users saw ten times more discounted games than under the curated setup. Valve described the resulting lift in wishlists and sales for those featured titles as "significant," though it did not publish exact figures.

A 10x expansion in discounted inventory shown per user signals a meaningful change in how deal-driven discovery works on the platform. Studios that previously competed for a small number of curated promo slots could see long-tail inventory surfaced to matched audiences automatically — but the same mechanics imply that games with weaker relevance signals for a given user will lose the incidental exposure that broad, hand-picked collections provided.

The mechanics matter for monetization planning. Seasonal sale events, publisher-devised promotions and Steam-team spotlights all currently feed the section on a fixed calendar. Teams timing discounts around major sale windows will still be able to run price promotions, but where those promotions appear — and to whom — will be decided algorithmically, per user, rather than by placement scheduling.

Valve frames the move as scale logic: customer tastes on a storefront of Steam's size are too diverse for a single shared calendar of deals to serve effectively, and the pool of relevant discounts available at any moment is too large for humans to triage.

The exact launch date has not been set. Valve says the section update arrives in early 2027, with specifics to be announced later — a window developers and publishers planning discount campaigns for the 2026–2027 cycle should watch closely.