Overview

Are you interested in hosting a Sales Event on Steam, or expanding your off-Steam gaming event with an on-Steam presence?

If so, Steam can equip you with tools to create your own Third-Party Sales Event. These allow you to build and manage your own custom event landing pages on Steam. In exceptional cases, these third-party events may even qualify for featuring on the homepage of the Store as described below.

Here's a small sample of some the creative event ideas we've seen third-parties bring to Steam:

• Publisher Sales Events - like the Super Giant Publisher Sale, the Kalypso Anniversary Sale or the Hooded Horse Publisher Sale.
  
  
  
  
• Franchise Sales Events - such as the Fallout Franchise Sale or Bruce Wayne's Birthday.
  
  
  
  
• Gaming Showcase Events - for example The Game Awards, gamescom or PAX.
  
  
  
  
• Regional Sales Events - such as Games from Turkey or Games Made in New Zealand.
  
  
  
  
• Themed Sales Events - such as TactiCon, the Cozy Games Celebration, or LudoNarraCon.
  
  

How It Works

Bringing your event to Steam can be a straightforward process—or a more involved one—depending on the scope of your plans. If this is your first time organizing a Sales Event on Steam, plan for at least three months to complete the steps below. If you're hoping for curated Store featuring, note that Steam’s promotional calendar fills up fast, so additional lead time is recommended.

1. Submit Your Event Idea

Start by outlining your event concept and submitting it via this Submission Form. This will automatically open a ticket with the Steam Events Team, who will review your proposal and confirm your agreement to the Event Hosting Rules outlined below.

2. Design & Build Your Custom Event

If your proposal is approved, the Events Team will enable the event tools so you can stage a Sale Page and start inviting participants. Be sure to share our guide on Participating in Third-Party Sales Events with any partners you invite. Use the Sales Page Editor documentation to aid your sale page design, and consult the Livestreaming documentation if you plan to include video content. You can reply to your open ticket at any time with questions.

3. Confirm your Event's Participants

Once you have a list of confirmed games that are participating in your event, please send their AppIDs to the Events Team via your ticket. If needed, the team can create a custom discount for your participants. Note that these discounts are not exempt from the standard 30-day cooldown, so participants should plan accordingly. Discounts are encouraged but not required—games can be listed at full price. However, this may affect your event's eligibility for curated discount featuring (see Event Visibility below).

4. Ask About Additional Featuring

By default, all events receive automatic Store featuring as described in Event Visibility below. However, once your event has submitted a confirmed list of participants, the Steam Events Team will review it to assess whether your event qualifies for additional curated Store featuring, such as a daily, midweek or weekend deal, or a homepage takeunder.

5. Submit Your Sale Page for Review

When your Sale Page is complete, click 'Request Review' in the ‘Sale’ tab of the Sale Event Editor. Reviews typically take 2–3 business days, during which the team will ensure your event complies with the Event Hosting Rules.

6. Publish Your Event

Once your sales event has been approved, you’re free to publish it whenever you’re ready. Keep in mind that, once published, this will immediately trigger your event's automatic visibility as outlined in Event Visibility. Otherwise, your sales page will otherwise remain visible until you choose to hide it.

Operational Tips

Event Hosting Rules

When you host a Third-Party Sales Event on Steam, these are the main rules for you to know and agree to:

Stay on Topic

• 1) Clear Presentation - Your sales page and event asset must clearly identify your event's topic and they must identify the organization hosting the event. Avoid naming your event a “Fest” unless that name predates its Steam promotion. This terminology is reserved for official Steam-hosted events.
  
  
• 2) No Off-Topic Games All games included in your sales event must be relevant to your chosen topic. Event submissions that include off-topic games will fail review, so please don't include sections or callouts for “other great games,” “friends of the host,” “more from this publisher,” etc.

No Ads or Special Treatment on Steam

• 3) No Promoting Off-Steam Content - Your Steam Sales event may not promote or link to off-Steam content, such as external stores, services, podcasts, newsletters, etc. You may optionally include sponsor logos in a special 'Thanks to our Supporters' section near the bottom of your sales event, or in a separate tab—but it cannot contain any outbound links.

• 4) No Selling Placement - You may optionally charge a participation fee for your event's off-Steam features -- such as physical booth space at a convention center or segment in a produced livestream -- but you may not charge for placement on your Steam Sale Page.
  
  
• 5) No Preferential Treatment - Games should be organized and grouped in a way that’s intuitive for customers, without giving preferential treatment to your own games or the games of your business partners. Use Steam’s “Smart Section” sorting whenever possible to help with this.

Get Permission & Set Expectations

• 6) Steam Approval is Required - Use of sale page tools and any on-Steam promotion are subject to approval by the Steam Events Team.
  
  
• 7) Secure Third-Party Approval & Manage Expectations - As always, Steam requires you respect the intellection property (IP) rights of others and secure appropriate permissions to include any games, assets, or IP in your event. Keep participants informed of the status of your event, and don’t promise a level of visibility unless it's confirmed. See Event Visibility section for more details.

Special Rules for Events that Receive Curated Homepage Featuring

These last few rules only apply if your event is chosen for curated homepage featuring. See Event Visibility for details on curated featuring.

• A) To be featured as a discount event (e.g. Daily, Midweek or Weekend Deal), most of the participating titles will need to be on discount during the featuring window, and the the discounted offers should be presented at the top of the sale page, above any non-discounted items, such as demos or coming soon games.
  
  
• B) Each game can only appear in one homepage-featured Publisher or Developer Sale per calendar year—regardless of how many publishers or developers worked on the game. If multiple options are available, choose the sales event that best fits.
  
  
• C) Games can only appear in one homepage-featured Franchise Sale per calendar year. For example, if a game includes both Lara Croft and Luke Skywalker, it must choose between the Tomb Raider or Star Wars Franchise Sale—not both.

Event Visibility Off Steam

We encourage you and your participating developers to promote your Sales Event through your any of your own marketing, social media, and websites. Each game and developer can help amplify the event by engaging their individual communities—so think about how they can contribute. To make promotion easier, consider providing a communications or asset kit with pre-approved artwork and messaging that participants can use both before and during the event.

Event Visibility On Steam

Steam may also promote your event in a few places across the Store. This featuring falls into two general categories, automatic and curated, which are described as follows:

Automatic Store Featuring

Your Sales Event will automatically appear in the following placements throughout the Store:

Sale Event News Hub & Special Events Page

When your event begins, it will appear in the Sale Events News Hub and Special Events Page of the Store.

Example:

Store Page Banner

Once your Sales Event is published, your Store Page banner will appear across the top of ALL games included in your Event Page for up to 2 weeks. You can set these up in the 'Sale' tab of the Event Editor under 'Store Page Banner'. This banner helps build awareness for your event and can lead players to your sales homepage. The below example shows a Store Page Banner across the top the Rift of the NecroDancer Store Page, which promotes and links to the Save & Sound Themed Sale.

Example:	This Store Page Banner:	Links Customers to this Sales Event:

Wishlist Notifications

When a game participating in your Sales Event goes on a discount of at least 20%, players who have wishlisted that game will receive the usual Steam Wishlist Notification, which leads them to the game's Store Page, which in turn can lead them to your sale homepage via the Store Page Banner, as outlined above.

Curated Store Featuring

The Steam Events Team will let you know if your event qualifies for curated featuring via your ticket as outlined in Step 4 above. This featuring can include homepage placements like the Takeunder, or discount placements like Daily, Midweek and Weekend Deals.

We tend to approach each decision from the customer's perspective and events chosen for curated featuring tend to have a combination of the following characteristics:

1. Strong Representation of their Chosen Topic

To be featured on the Steam homepage, an event must broadly represent its chosen topic. "Broad representation" means it includes a wide variety of games from the chosen topic and it includes a significant portion of the most popular games from the chosen topic. Note that very popular game genres -- for example 'Action', 'Horror', 'Strategy,' etc -- can potentially include thousands of Steam games across a wide variety of subgenres, which makes them very hard to represent comprehensively. Note: a narrower theme will lower the number of games required for broad representation. For instance, a 'Platformer Games' sale would need far more games to reach broad representation than a 'Roguelike Platformer Games' or an '8-Bit Platformer Games' sale.

2. Clear and Specific Topics

Curated featuring is more likely for an event with a well-defined and focused topic. Vague or subjective topics—like 'Beautiful Games,' 'Fun Games' or 'Classic Games'—can be interpreted in many ways by different customers, which makes broad representation much harder to achieve.

3. Games with High Customer Interest

While there's no penalty for including smaller or up & coming titles, featuring games with strong customer interest (as outlined in Visibility on Steam: Key Visibility Elements) increases the likelihood of curated support. Try to include as many high-interest games as possible that still fit your event's chosen topic.

4. Strong Off-Steam Presence

Events with a major off-Steam presence—like gaming conventions, award shows, or esports tournaments—can feel more impactful, timely and relevant for customers.

5. Discount Participation (for Discount Events)

To be featured as a discount event (e.g. Daily, Midweek or Weekend Deal), most of the participating titles will need to be on discount during the featuring window, and the the discounted offers should be presented at the top of the sale page, above any non-discounted items, such as demos or coming soon games.

6. Minimal Overlap with Other Featured Events

We’re more likely to feature your event if it doesn’t overlap with another featured event. For example, if two groups propose separate “Games from Finland” events, we’d likely suggest they combine efforts for a single promotion.

7. Alignment with Steam’s Promo Calendar & Operational Needs

Our promotional calendar fills up 6–10 weeks in advance, so if you're aiming for curated support, try to finalize your participants at least 4–8 weeks before your intended launch. Additional prep is required for featured events, including:
• Asset Delivery: We’ll need layered PSDs for use on the Store. These should clearly show the event’s theme, organizer ("presented by"), and event dates. Assets must be submitted no later than two weeks before the event starts.
  
• Localization: While Steam will localize your PSDs, you’re responsible for localizing the sale page itself. Use Steam’s pre-localized text strings when possible. If using custom text, plan to localize into all of Steam's supported languages—unless your event is region-specific (e.g. a "Games from Japan" event only featured in Japan would only need Japanese and English as a backup).

Example Work-Back Schedule

When planning a sales event, there are many factors that take time to coordinate and organize. As such, we recommend that you start planning at least three months ahead of the date you wish to run your event.

Your specific event may have more or fewer moving parts than this example, but this should help give you a general idea of some of the required milestones and the production timelines involved.

Lead Time	Milestone	Details
3+ Months Out	Submit Event Proposal	Submit your event proposal via this Submission Form. Include an overarching plan for your event along with a list of games that have expressed interest in participating.
3 Months Out	Build Sale Page	Have an approved event proposal and start building your sale page and adding games that have given their permission to join.
2 Months Out	Production Underway	If needed, remind participants to enter discounts for their games and plan for their livestreams (or any other communications or assets required for your event plan).
2 Weeks Out	Submit Sale Page & Assets	Finalize your sale page and submit it for review. If your event has been chosen for curated featuring, submit your layered PSD files to the Steam Events Team via the asset portal link shared in your ticket.
1 Week Out	Final Prep	Have an approved sale page. Remind your participants of any last-minute things they need to be aware of or to set live on the day of the event
Day 0	Event Launch!	Your event begins!

Example Assets

Here are some example assets we've received from past events. Of course, no two events are exactly alike, but we wanted to highlight these few because they accomplish several important communication goals:

• The event's theme comes through clearly for customers, even after a quick glance.
  
• Customers get a quick sense of kinds of games the Sales Page will include, even before they click the banner.
  
• The event's host is clearly presented, or, in the case of Franchise Sales and Publisher Sales, it's implicit.
  
• If the event has a livestream component, the asset communicates when it begins.

FAQ

• Q: I was invited to join a Third-Party Sales Event by someone outside my organization. Should I participate?

  A: This is up to you. If the event's theme or topic fits your game's positioning and branding, and the dates line up with your own promotional plans, you are encouraged to join. See Participating in Third-Party Sales Event for more information.
  
  

• Q: Is there a limit to the number of Sales Events I can run, or the number of Sales Events my game can participate in?

  A: In general, you can run as many Sales Events as you'd like and a game can participate in as many Sales Events as it would like, but there are a few limitations:
  • Don't forget the once-per-calendar-year rule for featured Publisher/Developer and Franchise sales (see 'Special Rules for Events that Receive Curated Home Featuring' above for details).
    
  • Keep in mind Steam's 30-day discount cooldown for any games that will be participating on discount.
    
  • The Steam Events Team may reject similar event ideas that are run too frequently, or run back to back, even if they're not receiving curated featuring. Steam Events aren't meant to be "evergreen" or re-run in rapid succession.
  
  
  

• Q: Can I include Coming Soon games, Follow buttons, Early Access games, Playtests or Demos in my Sales Event?

  A: Yes, this is fine as long as these apps and widgets are on topic and otherwise follow the rules outlined above. If your event is a discount event (for example, a publisher sale), you'll want to design your sale page such that the elements that aren't on discount are positioned lower on the page than the elements that are on discount. In other words, non-discounted items should move to the bottom of the page.
  
  

• Q: Some of my participants will be announcing new games during my event? Can I feature their Coming Soon pages on my Sale Page once they've been revealed?

  A: Yes, this is fine, but if you want to add a game to your sale page before its Coming Soon store page has been released, you'll need to use the 'Add by ID' button since the game's name wont appear in search yet. Even after the App ID has been added, the game still won't appear on your sale page until its Coming Soon page has also been released, and then it should appear automatically. If you need to add an entire section to your Sale Page during your event, for example a 'Just Announced' section that includes multiple reveals, this will need to be done as an edit to your live store page during the event, so please let the Steam Events Team know your plans in your ticket. Otherwise, they may lock your events page once its approved.
  
  

• Q: Can my sales event feature a charity?

  A: Yes, charity events are allowed, but keep in mind they must still follow the rules outlined elsewhere in documentation. We sometimes receive charity event submissions featuring a charity and a collection of unrelated games with no clear theme or through line, which makes it difficult to offer curated featuring. If curated featuring is a goal of your charity event, it's a good idea to match the theme of your sales event to the theme of the charity itself. For example, a collection of forest-themed games would be a great fit for a 'Save the Rainforests' charity event.

• Q: Can the topic of my sales event by a "launch party" for an upcoming game release?

  A: Aligning the launch of a new game with an Sale Event is allowed, but you'll want to make sure your event stays on topic (see Event Hosting Rules 1 & 2 above). Your two main options are:
  
  • Publisher Sale: If your event's topic is a publisher sale, you may include games from your entire publishing catalogue, but your sale page assets (including the Sale Page Header and Banner) must be about your larger publishing catalogue and brand; they can't specifically cross-promote the new release. In this case, you may still feature the new game on your sale page, for instance in a prominent section called "Just Released"
    
  • Franchise Sale: Alternatively, your event's topic may be a franchise sale, in which case your sale page assets may cross promote your new game as the newest installment for the franchise. If you choose this option, your sale page cannot include games from outside the franchise.
    
  • Note: Don't mix and match these options. For instance, don't set up your publisher sale with a Sale Page Banner that cross promotes your newest game. In either case, if your event is being featured as a discount event (e.g., a daily, midweek or weekend deal), please remember that all games not on discount should move to the bottom of the sale page.

Ready to Get Started?

Begin by outlining your event idea and submitting it via this Submission Form. We look forward to hearing about your event!