Steam announces new cap for game discounts

Last Updated on: 23rd February 2022, 08:52 am

Steam announced earlier today some important changes to their discount policy, the biggest of them being possibly a new cap for game discounts. The changes will be starting after March 28, so there’s still a long month before they actually happen.

Changes to the discounts were already announced earlier in the month, on February 2nd, but we finally got to know what will actually be changed from now on. The announcement was made through the Steamworks Documentation.

New cap for game discounts on Steam

Among the new changes, the most important ones were about the waiting time between two consecutive discounts for the same product and, of course, the aforementioned new 90% cap on discounts for any game on the Steam platform.

The full document can be accessed here. 

From now on, every title will have 28 days of cooldown before being available for discount again, instead of the previous 42. The only exceptions are the special seasonal Sales, being them the Lunar New Year Sale, the Summer Sale, the Autumn Sale, and the Winter Sale.

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Some other specific discount rules will be enforced:

• You can run a launch discount, but once your launch discount ends, you cannot run any other discounts for 28 days.
  
• It is not possible to discount your product for 28 days following a price increase in any currency.
  
• Discounts cannot be run within 28 days of your prior discount, with the exception of Steam-wide seasonal events.
  
• Discounts for seasonal sale events cannot be run within 28 days of releasing your title, within 28 days from when your launch discount ends, or within 28 days of a price increase in any currency.
  
• You may not change your price while a promotion is live now or scheduled for the future.
  
• It is not possible to discount a product by more than 90% or less than 10%.
  
• Custom discounts cannot last longer than two weeks, or run for shorter than 1 day.

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While games will not be able to have a bigger discount than 90%, it’s also now impossible to have a lower discount than 10%, although it was already pretty rare to see games with either 5% or 95% off.

These new rules make it somewhat easier to get a discount on a specific game since all of them will now be available for it more often. The new rules will start in late March, so if you’re planning to get any out-of-sale game, it might be worth holding your wallet for now.