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 Warhammer Skulls Festival 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 Ludoarracon.
  
  

How It Works

Follow the steps below to bring your events to Steam. This process can be quick and easy if you only plan to include your own games and you're already familiar with the event tools, or it can be long and involved if you plan to include many games across multiple publishers. In short, the scope of your production will scale with the scope of your event idea.

If this is your first time organizing a Sales Event on Steam, please plan for a minimum of three months to complete the following steps. If you are seeking curated featuring, Steam's promotional calendar fills up quickly, so you'll likely want even more lead time.

1. Submit your Event Idea to the Steam Events Team

Outline your event idea and submit it via this Submission Form. This will automatically open a ticket with the Steam Events Team to discuss your event proposal further. As part of this process, the team will ask you to confirm and agree to the Event Rules outlined below.

2. Design & Build your Custom Sales Event

If your event proposal is approved, the team will enable the event tools so you can start designing and building your own Sales Event and adding confirmed participants. When inviting potential participants to your event, be sure to share the information in Participating in Third-Party Sales Events with them. During the design process, please reference the Sales Page Editor documentation and, if your event includes a pre-recorded or live stream, you'll also want to review the Livestreaming documentation. Be sure to reply to your open ticket with any questions.

3. Finalize Your Event Participants

Once you've finalized the list of games that have agreed to join your event, please send their AppIDs to the Steam Events Team. This allows the team to create a custom discount for your participants (if relevant). This custom discount is not exempt from the usual 30-day discount cooldown, so please let your participants know to plan accordingly. Note: a discount is not required for a game to appear on your Sale Page; it can be included at regular (full) price, but may impact featuring decisions. See Event Visibility below for details.

4. Ask About Potential Featuring Opportunities

All events receive a certain amount of automatic visibility, but once Step 3 is complete, the Steam Events Team can make an informed decision and let you know if your event qualifies for additional curated Store featuring. See Event Visibility below for details.

5. Submit your Sale Page for Review

When you've finalized your Sale Page, submit it to the Steam Events Team for review by pressing the 'Request Review' button at the top of the 'Sale' tab in the Sale Event Editor. The review process usually takes 2-3 business days, during which time the team will confirm that your event follows the Event Rules outlined below.

6. Publish Your Event Page

Once your Event Page has been approved, you may publish your Sales Event when you're ready.

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

Think of your Sales Event as an essay. It needs a clear topic (thesis) and everything included must be organized and relevant to that topic. This means:

• 1) Your assets must clearly identify what your event is about and the group that's organizing it.
  
• 2) Your assets and all games included in your event must fit the theme or topic. No "friends of the host" sections, no "more from this publisher" footers, no "featured bundles" that include off-topic games, etc.
  
• 3) Similarly, the games on your sale page must be organized per your theme or topic. For example if your event is being featured as a discount event, then the top of your sale page must only feature games that are on discount (while non-discount elements like full-priced games, Demos, Coming Soon pages or 'Follow' widgets are moved to the bottom).
  
• 4) Don't position your third-party event to make it look like it's coming from Steam. For example, please avoid naming your event a "Fest" unless your event has been called this prior to promotion on Steam. This naming convention is reserved for official Steam-hosted Sales Events.

No Paid Advertising, Sponsorships or Special Treatment on Steam

Steam does not sell Store featuring or allow paid advertising, and neither can your Steam Event. This means:

• 5) No "thanks to our sponsors" sections, including on your Sales Page or in your Broadcast (if any).
  
• 6) You cannot give special featuring on your store page to specific games based on your pre-existing business relationships, including your own games.
  
• 7) You cannot charge participants to be featured on your Store Page. Your event may optionally charge a participation fee for off-Steam features (for example booth space at a convention center or a segment in a produced livestream), but placement on your Steam Sale Page cannot be marketed as an upsell, nor can it be the only benefit offered by your participation fee.

Get Permission & Set Expectations with your Participants

• 8) The hosting of your event, use of the sale page editor tools, and any promotion on Steam are at the discretion of the Steam Events Team.
  
• 9) Please keep your participants up to date on any decision making. Don't promise a specific level of visibility for your event until its confirmed by the Steam Events Team. If your event is seeking curated featuring on the Store, please read Event Visibility below for additional tips, rules and requirements.
  
• 10) Before adding a game to your Events Page, please get permission from the game or IP owner. Once a participating game has been included in your Sale Page, the owner of that game will see your event name and contact info in their Steamworks dashboard, even if your event is hidden or unpublished.

Special Rules for Publisher, Developer and Franchise Sales that Receive Curated Featuring

• 12) Each game can only be included in at most one homepage-featured Publisher or Developer Sale per calendar year, regardless of the number of co-Publishers or co-Developers listed on its Store Page. If multiple options are available, pick the one that fits best.
  
• 13) A similar rule applies for homepage-featured Franchise Sales. If a game could join multiple homepage-featured Franchise Sales in a calendar year (for example a Lego Star Wars game), pick only the one that's the best fit.
  • Note: These "calendar year rules" only apply to Publisher/Developer or Franchise Sales that receive curated homepage featuring. Otherwise, a game can join as many non-curated Publisher/Developer or Franchise Sales as it likes. See Event Visibility below for details on curated featuring.

Event Visibility Off Steam

You and your event participants are encouraged to promote your Sales Event via your own marketing efforts, social media channels or websites. Each participating game and developer can help amplify the overall event through their own communication channels, so be sure to think about how they can help get involved. It's also a good idea to provide your participants with pre-approved artwork and messaging (also known as a comms kit or asset kit), which they can use when messaging their own communities about your event, either ahead of time or once your event has gone live.

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 Store Featuring

Your Sales Event will 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.

Store Page Banner

Your Store Page banner will appear across the top of ALL games included in your Event Page. 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

A small subset of third-party events on Steam are chosen for curated featuring on the Store. This featuring can include placements like the frontpage Takeunder, or Daily, Midweek and Weekend Deals.
The Steam Events Team will let you know if your event qualifies for curated featuring via your ticket as outlined in Step 4 above. To maximize your event's chances of being selected for curated featuring, you'll want to ensure you've done ALL of the following prior to reaching Step 4:

Stay on Topic & Sufficiently Represent Your Chosen Topic

All events should stay on topic (see Rules 1 - 4 above), but to be featured on the Store, an event must also extensively represent its chosen topic. For example, a Publisher Sale that didn't include the publisher's most popular games or editions likely wouldn't be selected for curated featuring. Similarly, a "Platformer Game Celebration" would need hundreds of participants to sufficiently represent the full breadth of Platformer genre. In this regard, choosing a narrower theme can actually help. For example pivoting to a "Roguelike Platformer Celebration," would also reduce the number of participating games you'd need to sufficiently represent your new, narrower theme.

Include Participating Games with Lots of Customer Interest

Steam prefers to feature events which include games that generate lots of customer interest. The factors that determine customer interest are described in greater detail in Visibility on Steam: Key Visibility Elements. In short, Steam assumes that the customer interest in an event is the sum total of the customer interest in all the individual games included in the event. This means your event is not penalized for including games with low customer interest, but you'll still want to include as many games with high customer interest as possible to maximize your events' chances of being chosen for curated promotion.

Minimize Overlap with Other Featured Events

Steam is highly unlikely to feature multiple events with similar themes within the same calendar year, or even within a few months of each other in separate calendar years. For example, if two organizations separately pitched a "Games from Finland" regional sale event within the same year, we would likely encourage them to work together on a single Games from Finland sale the next year.

Build in Lots of Lead Time

Steam's promotional calendar tends to fill up about 6 to 10 weeks out, so you should aim to finalize your list of participants at least a month or two ahead of your chosen start date. This is also important because a few additional operational steps will be required to ensure your event is ready for Steam's global audience. These include:
1. Asset Intake - The Steam Team will request layered PSDs of your event assets to feature on the Store. Please design these to clearly present: the theme of your sale, the organizer of the sale (aka "presented by"), and the dates that your Sales Event will be active. These layered PSDs should be delivered no later than two weeks before the start of your event.
   
2. Discount Participation - If your Sale Page is being featured as a discounted sales event (e.g., a Daily Deal, Midweek Deal or Weekend Deal), then a large majority of the released games on your Sale Page must be on discount during your featuring dates. If they are not, or if a significant number of participants opt out of the discount event at the last minute, Steam may cancel your curated featuring.
   
3. Localization - The Steam Events team will localize your PSD assets for you, but you'll be responsible for localizing the Sale Page itself. This means you should use Steam’s pre-localized text strings when building out your Sale Page, or, if you choose to use your own custom text strings, you should plan to localize them into all of Steam's supported languages. NOTE - An exception is allowed for Regional Sales that are only being featured in one region. For example, a "Games from Japan" sale that's only being featured in Japan should only require two localizations: 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!

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: Can my event feature a charity?

  A: Yes, this is allowed, but keep in mind charity events must still follow the rules outlined elsewhere in documentation.
  
  

• 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 Rules 12 & 13 mentioned above).
    
  • 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 include them on my Sale Page?

  A: If you'd like to include a game on your sale page that's being announced during your event, this is fine. You can manually add the game once it's been announced, but if you want to do this, please let the Steam Events Team know in your ticket. Otherwise, they may lock your events page once its approved.

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!