Steamworks Documentation
Events and Announcements Visibility
This document describes where various types of events can appear.

Events are your communication channel with your players and prospective players on Steam. You can author a single event with images and metadata attached to it, and it will automatically be pushed out to all the relevant locations across Steam. To use this feature, your Steam account will need the 'Edit App Marketing Data'.

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Events appear in three main areas of Steam:
  1. Steam Community - Events appear on your community hub and in the activity feed of players that follow your game.
  2. Steam Store - Events appear on your game's store page and on the homepage when used with an Update Visibility Round.
  3. Steam Library - Events can appear on the library homepage and on your game's library detail page for players that play your game.

When you create an event, you are asked to select the most appropriate category for your event, which will impact how it looks, what data fields are available, and where that event will be surfaced. Visibility of these events depends on where we see that players are ready to receive each type of communication and whether they are in the right context to take action on that event.

Library Homepage Visibility

This is also known as to the 'What's New' section that is pinned to the top of their Library Home Page. It is intended to communicate to Steam players about content for games in their library, for example, updates, tournaments, DLCs and in-game events. The purpose is to keep the Steam players aware of all of the cool and exciting things that are happening in their library. It may encourage them to re-engage with a game they haven't played in a while. However, it is not intended to be a place to advertise other products or services.

Steam players have the ability to personalize the games and event types they will see. They can increase or decrease the frequency of events about games that appear in their 'What's New' section.

To present the best event to your fan on their home, you need to be mindful of when older events should no longer appear in this section. You can control homepage visibility of older events in two ways:

  • When you publish a new event, we will present you a dialog showing the other events that are visible in the homepage and let you choose to hide older ones.
  • You can always manage homepage visibility from the Events and Announcement Dashboard
Don't fret, those "hidden" events are not deleted. They continue to appear in chronological order within your game's Library Detail page and anywhere the Steam players engage with a past event. Players can scroll to see those older events.

When to Hide Older Events

Ideally, you should only have a single or maximum two events that can be visible on the homepage. Steam players seeing lots of old events may tire them and teach them to ignore your content.
  • Some events allow you to specify an end time. Steam will automatically remove those events from appearing in the homepage, so no action is needed on your part. You can always opt to make them disappear sooner, especially for long running events.
  • When dropping multiple teasers related to an upcoming launch or major event. In these case, when the new teaser is published, it is ideal to remove the old teaser. This helps keep the homepage fresh and exciting for your fans.
  • When creating a sequence of events post about a progress toward a larger event. For example, posting daily (or more often) about the results of an on-going tournament. In these cases, users would likely only want to know the latest announcement.

Featured Event

On your game page in the library, we usually show events in chronological order with the newest at the top. However, when the user goes to your library page, we also look for any event with the "Featured Event" flag set. We will show the newest of those above all of the chronologically displayed events. It will appear there until the user has seen it, at which point it will stay there for 48 hours before moving to the correct spot in the chronological list.

Enabling "Featured Event" flag
To force your event to be pinned to the top of your game's library page, select the "Options" tab for your event and toggle on the setting labeled "Display as a Featured Event on the Library Game Detail page?"

Exceptions

For the most part, all events appear in all places, but there are some exceptions for certain kinds of events that don't make sense to show to players in certain contexts.

Patchnotes

Small updates / Patchnotes intentionally don't appear in high-visibility locations like the library homepage or your game's store page. This gives you a way to publish a list of smaller or mundane changes to your game without pushing it in front of all players. This way, players can more easily find your bigger, more important updates and announcements.

Sale/Discount Events

These events are intended to be for prospective players, so they appear primarily in places where potential players will see them, such as on your game's store page and in your community hub. Events about discounts on your game do not appear to existing players in their library since they already own your game.

Cross-promotion

Events and announcements that are primarily about other games or other stores/platforms need to be categorized as Cross Promotion. This will allow those announcements to appear to your most engaged fans on your community hub and in the activity feed of followers. These events do not appear on the library homepage or on your store page.