Steam Scream is back for a fifth year of terrifying everyone... with amazing deals on spooky games! From now through November 2nd at 10 a.m. PT you can make your way through the Steam Store to find horrors of all kinds: psychological, slasher, silly, you name it.

Fill up your trick-or-treat bucket Steam library with your favorite scary games, and we bet you'll want to keep playing them well past the horror of the Halloween holiday itself.

Join us now for Steam Scream V... if you dare. (You totally should dare, to be clear.)

With today's Steam update, the Personal Calendar feature officially graduates from Steam Labs and is considered a full feature of the Steam Store. You can find it right on your Steam store homepage, or by visiting https://store.steampowered.com/personalcalendar

The Steam Personal Calendar is another way to see recommended games for you, showing both recently released and upcoming games filtered down to the the set of games we think you are most likely to be interested in. It uses your recently played games to find people with similar playtime profiles to you, and then looks at the games those players have been adding to their wishlist or playing.

• Based on games you play a lot: The system focuses on your playtime for games that you play the most. So, a few minutes trying out a new game or two won't have much impact on your recommendations, but sinking a bunch of time into a new favorite will.

• Refreshed daily: This recommendation system gets re-trained daily to incorporate the latest data. In reality you aren't likely to see your recommendations change all that much from day to day, but as time goes by you will obviously see new things pop up as the 8-week horizon of the calendar marches forward, or as games lock in their release dates.

The Steam Store has a number of different methods for recommending games. Some sections of the front page trend toward showing more popular games and some sections trend toward showing games similar to those you play regardless of how long ago they released. The Personal Calendar was designed to fill a gap in between: to help players find popular and niche games that may be of interest and are new or soon to release.

This approach seems to resonate strongly with many players, as we're seeing a lot of you exploring and clicking on games in the Personal Calendar.

For example, in an average 24-hour period, players click on over 2,000 different games on in the Steam Personal Calendar. That shows that not only is the calendar succeeding at matching games with players most likely interested, but also that players are exploring deep into their calendars to see what has recently released or is coming out far in the future.

The Personal Calendar first released as a Steam Labs experiment in October of 2025. Steam Labs is our designation for new store and discovery features that we think are interesting, but that need more focused feedback to be refined into a polished product. With eleven months of feedback from players and developers, we've been able to refine the Personal Calendar into a great way to discover new games.

During the course of development while in Steam Labs, we've made a number of improvements big and small. For example, we added the ability for game developers to specify a date they intend to release from Early Access to 1.0 so that we could list these titles on the calendar. We also added better filtering tools and display options for things like wishlisted games, Early Access games, and DLC. Extensive work was also put into making the new feature work smoothly across different devices, including desktop PC, mobile devices, and SteamOS devices.

Q. Where can I learn more about how the Personal Calendar works?

A. We just put out a new video and documentation aimed at helping game developers understand how the Personal Calendar works for surfacing their games. Check it out here if you are interested in more of the details:

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/visibility/personalcalendar

Q. Did any of these games pay to be shown to me?

A. No, we don't sell placement on the Steam Personal Calendar, or anywhere else on Steam. The Personal Calendar also isn't hand-curated. The featuring in the personal calendar is done algorithmically and it is personalized for each user. If you're curious about how visibility works on Steam, we put together a great set of documentation and video for game developers here:

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/visibility

Q. Will I get stuck in a bubble of recommendations only like the games I've been playing lately?

A. We're also concerned about the potential for getting stuck in a filter bubble (getting too narrow of recommendations), so we work hard on keeping things varied. With the Personal Calendar, it's unlikely that every day has a new game launching that is the same genre/theme as games you've been playing and is also a good recommendation for you. As a result, the recommendations generated by the Personal Calendar end up drawing from a wider pool of titles across all kinds of genres that are releasing each day.

In the pursuit of building a better platform and shopping experience, the Steam Team are continually experimenting with new ideas around discoverability, video, machine learning, and more. Some of these experiments are clear and obvious upgrades to existing features, or are part of products we've already decided to build, and they get built out and released. Other times, we end up with experiments where we feel like we would benefit from more input from Steam users to help inform the direction that we take it, or whether it is even interesting enough to turn into a full feature.

With Steam Labs experiments, you can try, share, and break these potential new features, while we figure out what to keep and what to scrap. Share your feedback with the developers and designers working on these features and help shape the future of Steam.

Check out all experiments on the Steam Labs page or drop us some feedback in the Steam Labs discussion boards.

The October edition of Steam Next Fest has begun, with thousands of FREE demos awaiting your gaming fingers. Check out the trailer above for a sneak peek of the variety of games you'll find!

We host Steam Next Fest three times a year (February, June, October) as a way to highlight games before they've launched. Developers from all over the world share their demos, and by wishlisting your favorites (after playing them for free!) you can keep up with their path to official launch on Steam.

New for this edition: we've made some changes to (hopefully) make it easier to browse the fest. Now you can search by genre, theme, feature, and even sub-category. Our video below gives you a quick tour.

The October 2026 edition of Steam Next Fest runs through October 26th at 10 a.m. Pacific.

Have fun!

-The Steam Team

(Below: Our welcome video with a quick tour of the updated navigation for Steam Next Fest)

We're starting a beta for Steam Achievement Sets, a new feature aimed at improving the achievement experience on Steam.

Games today live longer than ever, continuing to receive updates through new DLC, expansions, and seasons. But achievements added with new game content can be hard to discover and can accidentally break the completion status of players who have already finished the game.

We have designed Achievement Sets to help address these types of issues. You can try them out in today's Steam Client beta and in a growing set of games that have already added support.

This beta enables developers to group their game's related achievements together in collections we are calling Achievement Sets. Devs can specify the number of sets and the purpose of each to match their game's specific needs. You can imagine one game grouping its achievements into single-player and multiplayer sets, or another into 8 class-based sets.

In games that support sets, you still unlock achievements by playing the game as usual. But when you browse what you have unlocked afterward, Steam will break the long list of game achievements into the developer-created sets, making it easier to see what you have completed and to find other related achievements you can unlock next.

Each Achievement Set also has its own progress bar showing how far along you are in that area. Once you have unlocked every achievement in a set, Steam will commemorate the moment and add a "set complete" trophy to your profile. If new achievements are later added to the set, your completion is preserved.

As a game grows, developers can create new sets to hold achievements for the added content. These new sets make it easy for returning players to see what new things they can unlock, while also preserving their prior completion status until they play again.

There are two types of Achievement Sets.

Base Game sets contain achievements that can be earned by all players who play a game. Their progress and trophies are displayed in blue on your achievements page.

Some games contain achievements that can only be earned once you have purchased additional content (DLC) for that game. These achievements can now be grouped into new DLC sets, allowing you to separately track what you have unlocked in the new content.

DLC achievements are not included in your overall game progress until you have access to the content. Once acquired, they will be displayed as purple progress and trophies on your achievements page.

All possible achievements for a game can be explored from the new achievements page, so if you are curious, give the page a skim to see what the game's DLC has added.

We are also introducing the ability for game developers to archive individual achievements or entire Achievement Sets. We think there are a lot of fun ways games can take advantage of the temporary nature this can add, such as adding achievements to season-based games or enabling time-limited holiday achievements.

Once archived, users who had already unlocked the achievement or set will still see it on their profile. However, archived achievements won't show up on the profile pages of users who missed the unlock nor block their progress toward completing a set or game. Anytime an achievement can no longer be unlocked by users, it should be archived.

Bringing this all together is an updated achievements page, accessible from your Games List on the web and from games in your Steam Library. The new page gives you a summary of your overall progress, progress in each achievement set, and details on individual achievements.

Global Stats, or the per-achievement completion rates, are now available as a toggle here rather than on a separate page.

Search has also been expanded with filters for specific achievement sets and for locked or unlocked achievements. Plus, there's a little extra joy when you complete all your achievement sets.

You can now compare your game progress with up to three friends, including rare achievements, completed sets, and progress in DLC sets. You'll see both the number of achievement sets you've completed and a new, more accurate total achievement count, making it easier to compare your progress with friends. This total is based on achievements each player can actually earn, which may vary depending on the add-on content they have and whether certain achievements are time-limited or archived. As a result, the total can differ from friend to friend. 

We've rebuilt a few areas where achievements are displayed, to show off your overall achievement and set progress throughout Steam. You'll see your completed sets on your profile in the Recently Played section, your Games List, your Library, and more.

• The Perfect Games tab is now called Completed and expands to show both completed games and games with completed achievement sets.

• Games with completed achievement sets can now be added to the Completionist Showcase, in addition to completed games.

• Games played via Family Sharing are now displayed in the Games List.

• Friends with playtime in a game through Family Sharing are now eligible for friend comparison.

• Store and Library game pages will now show if a game has achievement sets.

These updates are now available as a beta for both players and game developers. Here's how to join the Steam Client Beta. We'll continue making improvements during the beta, so make sure to let us know what you think.

As developers begin using the new tools, you'll start seeing these changes appear for supported games.

The following games have already added achievement sets:

• Against the Storm

• Age of Wonders 4

• American Truck Simulator

• Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare® 4

• Crusader Kings III

• DREDGE

• Euro Truck Simulator 2

• Forza Horizon 5

• Flock Around

• He is Coming

• LEGO® Batman™: Legacy of the Dark Knight

• Left 4 Dead 2

• Portal 2

• PowerWash Simulator

• PowerWash Simulator 2

• Team Fortress 2

• Victoria 3   

Are you a game developer interested in seeing how easy it is to add achievement sets? Read the Steamworks blog post here.

Steam Cooking Fest is just begging for us to use cooking puns, but we're way too mature for that.

(Except for our headline here. OK and also our trailer.) The rest of this post, though? Pun-free!

Are there cooking games of all kinds on sale for the week? Definitely. Run a restaurant, operate a food truck, cook for giant onions and rats and all kinds of things!

Join us now for Steam Cooking Fest, on through October 19th at 10 am Pacific on Steam.