Occasionally game developers or publishers ask about hosting a 'franchise sale' on Steam, gathering up and discounting all of the games that are part of the same series or franchise. We’re happy to share the tools for setting up and hosting your own franchise sale, though for the most part we’re not able to give the franchise sale front-page visibility.

However, Steam is already set up to surface your event in a few different ways. Please see Event Visibility below for details.

Rules

When you are thinking about putting together a franchise 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 franchise being promoted. Publisher logos should not be included.
6. If the sale and page is about promoting a specific franchise, then it should only include games from that franchise.
   
   • Bundles and DLC from other titles are only eligible if the franchise name is prominently featured. In-game updates with crossover content is not allowed on the Franchise page, as it's not immediately obvious to customers why it is related to the Franchise.
7. Additionally, every game on Steam is eligible to appear in only one developer/publisher sale and one franchise sale a year, assuming that makes sense for the title. 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

To set up a sale page on Steam, you'll find a submission link at the bottom of this page under "Getting Started".

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

Sale pages are organized under a Steam Community group associated with your developer or publisher.

1. Create a Steam Community group with the name of your franchise or publisher or developer. You already have one if you set up a Developer Homepage on Steam already.
   
2. Include a link to this group when filling out the submission form, and the Steam promo team will enable the sale tools for an event under your group.

Event Visibility

Franchise sales are only promoted on the homepage of Steam under certain circumstances, when the catalog of games has multiple top-performing titles. However, there are a couple of other ways that Steam will automatically help your event be surfaced to 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 franchise to promote your event. After setting up a sale page that includes all of the games that fit in your franchise, there is an optional ‘store banner’ that can be configured. That clickable banner would then appear on top of each of your included 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 franchise sale page. These banners appear on the top of your game pages for up to two weeks (shorter if the end date of your event page is set to a sooner date).

Curated Deal

In the case that one or more of your games in the franchise qualifies for one of our curated discount spots, we can feature your franchise instead of the individual title. In this case, we would use a Daily Deal, Midweek Deals, or Weekend Deal spot to feature your franchise.

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

Examples

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

Have Questions?

https://help.steampowered.com/en/wizard/HelpWithPublishing?issueid=933

Getting 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