🗓️ How Steam Personalized Calendar can help you sell games

If you're an indie game dev like me, Steam is probably important to you.

Valve (who runs Steam) pushes new changes often. One new change is a feature called Steam Personalized Calendar.

With millions of players on Steam, even small optimizations to our games can make meaningful improvements for us humble devs. So let's figure out this new calendar feature and what it means for us (and our games).

What is Steam Personalized Calendar?

Valve launched this new feature (and this post) on October 21st, 2025.

Here are some of the important details:

• Your personal calendar consists of data that's automatically generated for you
• It shows a calendar of game releases (including both recently released and upcoming games)
• The calendar spans 8 weeks
• Its contents are "Recommendations based on your playtime"
• However, it's not only based on your own data: "This new calendar finds people with similar playtime profiles to you, and then looks at the games those players have been adding to their wishlist."
• The calendar shows games released/releasing only on weekdays. "The rare games that do have weekend release dates will show up on the calendar on the following Monday."

It's customizable, allowing you to filter by tags, and hide games you already own:

♻️ A Refreshed Steam Store Home Page

So it's a cool feature, but it was a little buried. Users had to go find it.

But no longer!

On June 4 of this year (2026), Valve rolled out A Refreshed Steam Store Home Page. Importantly, this change includes a Your Personal Calendar section on Steam users' homepages. This section shows a snapshot of a user's personal calendar and links to the full personal calendar.

As you can imagine, the Steam home page receives massive traffic from Steam's 132 MILLION monthly active players. This gave a huge boost to visibility in games that appear in users' personal calendars.

The calendar appearing on users' homepages is a game-changer. It went from "kind of buried" to "most users will see this".

GameDiscoverCo emphasizes that this change could be very good for wishlists:

So as a first takeaway: if you have decent wishlists, expect a big run-up in the 30 days before launch, due to the Personal Calendar.

- Simon Carless

Players who have wishlisted your game will see it appearing repeatedly on their homepages as your launch date approaches. That's great! This will help keep your game visible.

How to Market A Game points out that the calendar's 8-week window emphasizes a 2 month period between your launch date announcement and your launch:

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not shadow drop your game.

Personal Calendar has a 2 month pre-launch window of visibility which essentially encourages 2 months more of just hanging out on Steam

- Chris Zukowski

Valve launched the Personalized Calendar feature, iterated on it, then pushed it to users' homepages where it started getting loads of traffic. They clearly think this new feature is important, and it looks like it's here to stay.

So what should we do to take advantage of this?

📈 How to plan your Steam launch

You can just launch your game. You really can! A couple of my friends have done this recently (e.g. [Redacted] The Safehouse and LINOVICTUS). Sometimes simply launching your game is the way to go.

If you want to take full advantage of Steam Personal Calendar and other Steam promotional features, here are some ways to do that:

1. Launch your Steam page (once you have solidified your genre, art style, and have a trailer ready)
2. As soon as you can, launch your demo
3. Send your demo to content creators who enjoy your kind of game (see: How to find content creators to play your game)
4. Try to get 8,000+ wishlists (see: What Works For Getting Wishlists?) so your game is featured in more Steam widgets
5. Plan for at least 8 weeks between your launch date announcement and your launch to capitalize on the new Steam Personal Calendar
6. Enter your game into the last Steam Next Fest before your launch (see: Upcoming Steam Events). They happen annually in February, June, and October.

🛠️ Steam overview for game devs

Steam is amazing! It’s also overwhelming, so let’s take a quick tour.

ValadriaMatt Hackett

If you want to release as fast and tight as possible (while still taking advantage of Steam's offerings), you could announce your release date a month before your target Steam Next Fest, then launch your game a month after that.

So something like this:

• Announce your game's launch date in January (launching in March)
• Enter into the next fest in February
• Launch your game in March

This is a lot to think about, I know! Try not to get lost in the sauce. The most important thing you can do is make the best game that you can. If you're feeling overwhelmed, read This Is All That Matters About Games Marketing.

If you enjoyed this article you might like my book How to Make a Video Game All By Yourself. It's a breezy read, yet dense with 200+ pages of hand-written game dev advice, illustrations, and curated quotes similar to the one above.

• Get the digital version on Itch
• The paperback version on Amazon
• Or a signed copy (while they last)

Thanks for reading and good luck with your game! If you'd like to chat about any of this stuff, join the friendly and welcoming Valadria Discord.

-Matt

🔗 Links

• A new way to discover new & upcoming games: Personal Calendar
• A Refreshed Steam Store Home Page
• How the Steam Personal Calendar affects your launch
• How Steam's personal calendar is supercharging pre-launch discovery...