All-Time Lows vs. Percentage Discounts

The percentage on a Steam discount banner tells you one thing: the size of the cut from the current regular price. It does not tell you how good the deal is in any historical sense. A 75% discount on a game whose regular price was recently raised is not the same as a 50% discount on a game that has held a stable price for years.

That is why ATLGames leads with all-time lows. The all-time low is the cheapest the game has ever been sold for on Steam (US pricing) since we began tracking it. It is a single concrete number, and it is the only honest answer to "am I getting the best price I can?" A 60% discount that is the all-time low is a better deal than a 75% discount that is still 20% above the historical floor.

The four signals on a deal

• New ATL: the current price is below the recorded low, or equals a low first reached within the last 21 days (the length of the longest Steam sale). The strongest signal.
• Tied ATL: the current price matches the recorded low, and that low was first reached more than 21 days ago. You are paying the historic floor; the game has simply been here before.
• Near ATL: the current price is above the low by up to 30%, and the badge shows the exact gap (for example +12%).
• No badge: discounted, but not unusually so. Compare the chart against past sales before buying.

The 21-day rule exists because our upstream data marks every return to a floor as a "new low". Our own record of when the floor was first reached is the better judge: a price that merely comes back to a floor set months ago is a tie. Every rule is spelled out on the methodology page.

Why ties matter more than new lows

When we classified every recorded sale by whether it beat, matched or fell short of the game's previous best price, 16.5% set a new low, 43.5% matched the existing low exactly, and 40% were above it. Publishers find a floor and then return to it, sale after sale, often for years. Treating "New ATL" as the only acceptable buy signal means skipping most of the best prices you will ever see.

Reading the gap

When a game page says "the current price is about 20% above the all-time low", that is a more useful number than the headline percentage off. It tells you exactly how much you would save by waiting for a future deeper sale, and with the typical game discounting every six weeks, you can decide whether that saving is worth the wait. Under 10% it rarely is; over 20% a seasonal sale is usually worth holding out for.