Methodology & editorial standards

Where the data comes from

Prices are collected from two sources. IsThereAnyDeal provides the Steam deal feed and historical price records that form the backbone of every chart and analysis on this site, under an agreement with its creator; the Steam Web API and Steam store provide live prices, review counts, genres and release dates. ATLGames tracks Steam only, in US dollars, and does not attempt to compare stores. Game artwork is served from Steam's and IsThereAnyDeal's content networks.

We keep our own record of each game's lowest observed Steam price and the date it was first reached. That record, not the discount percentage printed on the store page, is the reference point for everything below.

How often it updates

• Every three hours: the newest price changes in the Steam deal feed are imported, and the current prices of the 1,500 most popular games on Steam are re-checked directly against the Steam store.
• Daily: a verification pass re-checks every game still marked as discounted that has not been re-confirmed in the past week, oldest first, against IsThereAnyDeal — a sale is marked as ended only after that check — and the Steam top-sellers ranking is refreshed. Separately, a continuous pass over the entire deal feed (well over a hundred thousand games) walks the whole catalog every few days.
• Continuously: listing pages are served from a cache that is refreshed in the background, so a price you see may be up to a few hours old. The game page always states when its figures were last checked.

Steam prices can change between our checks. Treat any price here as a strong indication, not a guarantee, and confirm it on the store page before buying.

Exactly how the badges are decided

A badge is only ever shown on a game that is currently discounted. The comparison is always against the lowest Steam price we have on record for that game.

New ATL

The current price is below the recorded low, or it equals the recorded low and that low was first reached within the last 21 days (the length of the longest Steam seasonal sale). A price that merely returns to a floor set months ago is not new, even if an upstream feed flags it that way.

Tied ATL

The current price equals the recorded low and that low was first reached more than 21 days ago. This is the most common good outcome: in our full history, 43.5% of sales match a previous low and only 16.5% beat it.

Near ATL

The current price is above the recorded low by no more than 30%. The badge shows the exact gap (for example "+12%") so you can decide whether waiting for the floor is worth it.

Above ATL

The current price is more than 30% above the recorded low. The optional "hide bad deals" filter removes anything more than 50% above its low.

Popular

The game appears in Steam's current top-sellers chart. Rankings are refreshed nightly and removed when a game drops off the chart.

How the per-game analysis is computed

The "Deal Analysis" on each game page is built from that game's own recorded price points. Nothing in it is written by a language model or copied from another site; the sentences are assembled from the following computed facts, so two games with different histories read differently.

• A sale is a contiguous period in which the price sat below the regular price, recorded at its lowest point.
• Typical sale cadence is the median gap between the start dates of consecutive sales, shown only once a game has at least three recorded sales.
• Deepest discount is the largest percentage off we have ever recorded for the game.
• Seasonal habits are reported when a game has discounted at least twice inside the same Steam seasonal sale window.
• Next-sale expectation adds the game's cadence to the start of its most recent sale. It is an expectation, not a prediction of a specific date.
• The recent-sales table lists the most recent discount periods with their start date, length, discount and price, newest first.

Site-wide statistics quoted in articles (for example the 41-day median cadence) are computed the same way across every game with a recorded history, and each article states the sample size it was computed from.

What the data does not cover

• Prices are Steam US. Regional prices differ, sometimes substantially, and the badges are computed against US history only.
• Our history for a game begins when the tracker first recorded it, which is not always the game's release date. "All-time low" means the lowest price in our record.
• Games that essentially never discount, and brand-new releases, are under-represented in site-wide statistics because they rarely appear in the deal feed.
• Bundles, key resellers and non-Steam stores are out of scope by design.
• Review scores come from Steam and are refreshed on the same cadence as prices; very new games may show no score yet.

Editorial standards

Articles on ATLGames are written by Matt Vieten, who built and runs the site. They are not sponsored, do not contain affiliate links, and are not supplied by publishers. Where an article relies on numbers, those numbers come from the tracker's own data set and the article says how they were computed and from how many games. Opinions about what to buy are opinions; the price history behind them is reproducible from the game pages.

Links to Steam are plain store links. ATLGames does not earn a commission on purchases. The site is supported by display advertising, which is kept off pages that have no content of their own (policy pages, empty states, error pages).

Corrections

If a price, badge or figure is wrong, email contact@atlgames.io with the game's page link and what you expected to see. Data errors are usually fixed by the next scheduled refresh; errors in how a figure is computed are fixed in the site itself and noted on this page.

ATLGames is not affiliated with Valve or Steam. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.