Steamworks Documentation
Publisher or Developer Sales
Occasionally game developers or publishers ask about hosting a 'publisher sale' on Steam, gathering up and discounting all of the games made or published by a certain company. We’re happy to share the tools for setting up and hosting your own publisher sale, though for the most part we’re not able to give the publisher sale front-page visibility.

However, Steam is already set up to use the power of your own catalog of games to promote your event. After setting up a sale page that includes all of the games made by a developer or publisher, there is an optional ‘store banner’ that can be configured. That clickable banner would then appear on top of each of your game’s store pages, leading players back to your main sale page.

Rules

When you are thinking about putting together a publisher sale, here are the main points for you to know and agree to:
  1. The hosting of your event, use of sale page editor tools, and any promotion on Steam is all at the discretion of Valve.
  2. Your landing page should clearly explain both the event and the group that is organizing it.
    • In addition, any promotional banners used on Steam (including Store Page Banners) must also clearly describe the name of the event and who is hosting/organizing the event.
    • Please avoid naming your event a "____ Fest" unless your event has been called this prior to promotion on Steam.
  3. Unless specifically agreed upon with Valve, we cannot promise any specific Steam store visibility for the event. Marketing efforts would be 100% up to you and the individual game developers involved. In some cases, we choose to help promote events, but we usually can't make that call until we know which games you'll have participating, the scope of the event, and any accompanying promotion or activities.
  4. If Valve chooses to promote your page within the Steam store:
    • Broadcasting - We need to approve what broadcasting content will be shown. This is generally fine for industry talks or game announcement, but since we don't sell ad space on Steam, we want to be aware (as well as approve) of any kind of sponsorship logos or possibly ads for other brands or stores prior to the launch of the event.
    • All graphical banners and images need to be provided to Valve as layered .psd files at least a week ahead of time for localization.
  5. Product page banner - this banner shows up on store pages of the apps that are included in the event and provides a bit of cross promotion value.
    • The only acceptable logos that can appear on Store Page Banners are for the name of the developer or publisher being promoted.
  6. If the sale and page is about promoting your developer or publisher's collection of games, then it should only include games from that developer or publisher.
  7. Additionally, every game on Steam is eligible to appear in only one developer or publisher sale a year. If it could fit into more than that, please choose the one that makes the most sense for the title.

Access to the sale-building tools

Once we've agreed that your proposed event makes sense to run on Steam, we can grant you access to the sale page editor tools. These tools allow you to define the list of participating games, create sub-categories for organizing them (if appropriate) and uploading your custom artwork for the background of the page and associated marketing banners.

Here you can find a description of the editing tools.

And the bare minimum assets needed for a sale page

Creating A New Sale Page

  1. Create a Steam Community group with the name of your publisher or developer. You already have one if you set up a Developer Homepage on Steam already.
  2. Let your Valve contact know the URL of your group. Valve will enable the sale tools for an event under your group.

Event Visibility

Publisher sales are only promoted on the homepage of Steam under certain circumstances, where the catalog of games has multiple top-performing titles. However, there are a couple of ways that Steam can help your event be easily discovered by players.

Special Offers Page

All sale events will automatically appear listed in the "Special Events" section of the Special Offers page for players looking for good deals on games.

Store Page Banners

Steam is already set up to use the power of your own catalog of games to promote your event. After setting up a sale page that includes all of the games made by a developer or publisher, there is an optional ‘store banner’ that can be configured. That clickable banner would then appear on top of each of your game’s store pages, leading players back to your main sale page.

When all of your game's discounts go live, the players that wishlist any one of those games will get the usual Steam wishlist notification and can easily find their way from that individual game via the store page banner to your full publisher sale page.

Curated Deal On A Featured Game

Instead of featuring a publisher sale on the homepage of Steam, we are more likely to feature an individual game or franchise if you have a game that qualifies for one of our curated discount spots. In this case, we would use a Daily Deal, Midweek Deals, or Weekend Deal spot to feature your best-selling game to drive player interest. Then the power of your store page banners (as described above) would help those players find their way to the rest of your catalog.

For more information on curated promotions, please see Discounting: Curated Discounts

Examples

Here you might find some inspiration from other publisher events we've seen in the past:

Have Questions?

https://help.steampowered.com/en/wizard/HelpWithPublishing?issueid=927

Ready to get started?

If all of this sounds interesting to you, you can start the process by following this URL and filling out the questions: https://help.steampowered.com/en/wizard/HelpWithPublishing?issueid=938