This site's front page is small on purpose. Dozens of games go on sale every week; only a handful clear our checks. Here's exactly what happens between a price dropping somewhere and a deal appearing here — because a deals page you can't audit is just advertising.
Step 1: the weekly scan
Every Monday, an automated watch pulls live prices for the games we track across Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store, and compares each current price against that game's historical pricing. The scan also flags new discounts and discounts that deepened since last week. Console prices for our Amazon section are checked separately against live listings.
Step 2: the validation gate
Raw scan results go through a strict validation pass before anything is publishable. The rules are deliberately unforgiving:
- Every deal needs a live, observed current price — never a cached or assumed one.
- Every deal needs a real base price (the actual reference price, observed live) that is at least as high as the current price.
- The claimed discount must match the computed discount within one percentage point — no inflated percentages.
- Back-calculated list prices are rejected outright. If we can't observe the reference price, the deal doesn't ship.
On a typical week this rejects more candidates than it keeps. That's the point: the gate exists to catch exactly the fake-discount tricks described in our guide to spotting fake discounts.
Step 3: the judgment call
Validated deals are then ranked by a price-judging model that weighs discount depth against historical lows, sale timing, and cross-store pricing. A 50%-off deal at a historic low in a quiet month outranks a 70%-off deal that's been cheaper before. Only the top-ranked deals make the page — usually around a dozen.
What we don't do
- Take payment for placement. No store can pay to appear or to rank higher.
- Publish affiliate links without a real tag or a real observed price.
- Mix prices across stores. A Steam price is never shown next to an Amazon button.
- Republish press-release "deals" without checking the numbers ourselves.
Why it matters
The deals internet runs on volume: pages stuffed with hundreds of "deals," most of them mediocre, because more links mean more clicks. We run the opposite play — a short list we'd defend one by one. If a game is on our front page, it survived a scan, a validation gate designed to reject it, and a ranking pass. That doesn't mean you should buy it — it means the discount is real, and the decision is yours.