Steam Is Finally Changing How Games Get Their Big Front-Page Break

The front page of Steam has long been a hot commodity for game developers and publishers, but next year, some big changes are coming. Valve has announced that it'll be changing how it handles game discoverability during sales and promotions on Steam, as it'll be moving away from the old model of a tightly controlled page through a manually curated calendar to dynamic, personalized recommendations that'll cater to individual user preferences and their purchase history.

Historically, Valve employees selected which games got featured in a limited number of fixed slots on the Steam front page, and only a fraction of discounted games got valuable front-page visibility. According to Valve, preliminary experiments resulted in up to 10 times as many games appearing per day in the Discounts & Events section, leading to measurable increases in store page visits and wishlist additions.

What does this mean? For developers, it means that they won't need to rely on relationships, manual pitches, or sheer …