When Steam games actually go on sale, from 1.9 million recorded discounts

Everyone tells you to wait for the sale. Nobody tells you how long the wait is.

So I measured it. This site keeps a price history for 80,562 Steam games, going back to 2013, built from IsThereAnyDeal's price records and Steam's own store data. Across those histories sit 1,887,637 recorded discounts. That is enough to stop guessing. Here is what the data says.

The typical gap between sales is five to ten weeks

For every game with at least two recorded sales, you can measure its rhythm: the average time between one discount starting and the next. The single most common answer is five weeks. Seven in ten of these games run a gap between four and ten weeks.

That is much faster than the seasonal-sale folklore suggests. The big Steam events get the headlines, and the quiet weekly deals, publisher sales, and franchise weekends do most of the actual discounting. If a game you want just went off sale, the odds are good you are weeks from the next chance, not months.

The folklore is not useless. The seasonal events do cluster the deepest cuts. But "wait for the Summer Sale" is usually the slow version of "wait a month and a half."

Most sales are deep

I expected a wall of token 10 percent discounts. Wrong. Of the 1.9 million recorded sales, about seven in ten are 50 percent off or deeper. The single most common depth is exactly 50 percent, and the 70 and 80 percent bands together hold over half a million events.

The reason is age. A catalog this size is mostly older games, and an older game discounts deep because the sticker price stopped being real years ago. The practical read: for anything more than a couple of years old, a 20 percent cut is not an event. Its history almost certainly holds a 50.

If it went on sale once, it will again

Of the 80,562 games with any price history here, 86 percent have been discounted at least twice. Repetition is close to a law. The first sale is the hardest one to wait for; after that, the game has told you its rhythm and you can hold it to it.

This is also why "the deal ends tonight" should not move you. On this data, the deal reliably comes back, usually within a couple of months, often at the same depth.

Right now, four in ten games are discounted

On the day I pulled these numbers, 32,033 of the 77,614 paid games on this site carried a discount. That is 41 percent of the paid catalog, on an ordinary Tuesday with no headline sale running. A discount, by itself, is background noise on Steam. The question is never "is it on sale." It is "is this a good price for this game," which only its own history can answer.

One more number from today's snapshot: 68 percent of the games currently discounted are sitting at the deepest cut their history has ever recorded. When a sale does land, it lands at the floor more often than not. Checking a game's page for its recorded low tells you in one glance whether today's price is the real one.

How to actually use this

• Look up the game's own history, not the platform folklore. Its last three sales tell you more about the next one than the sale calendar does.
• For an older game, treat 50 percent off as the normal sale, not the exceptional one.
• If you just missed a sale, expect another within five to ten weeks. Wishlist it, set an alert, and go play something from the backlog.
• If a game has never been discounted, its history says so, and waiting has a real cost. Some games simply do not go on sale, and the data will tell you which ones.

Every game page on this site draws its own price chart from this same history and states the recorded low, so the waiting math is done before you get your wallet out. The numbers above come from the site's own pipeline; price history is built from IsThereAnyDeal data with prices from Valve's Steam store, and the snapshot figures were measured on August 4, 2026. They will drift as the catalog grows. The shape of them has held steady all year.