"Horse Fest" – Steam Announces Horse-Themed Game Sale for February 2026

In an announcement post for Steam Developers on July 31st 2025, Valve revealed its sales and events schedule for the first half of 2026. “You'll notice we're experimenting with running Spotlight Fests, which let us go deeper with more niche themes over a shorter period of time",” says the announcement. Among other genre-specific and focused thematic sales like Hidden Object Fest, Deckbuilders Fest and Medieval Fest, Steam announces Horse Fest, taking place from February 19 - 23 next year.

Steam Themed Sales

Themed sales and genre-specific events have become a crucial tool for indie game marketing in the past few years, especially as Steam Next Fest becomes rather overcrowded with more games and demos than players and content creators could possibly cover. Frequently, these sales are hosted and organized by individual publishers or developers, who gather fellow devs through their networks and then approach Valve with a packed lineup to argue for a front page featuring. If you’ve never noticed these on your Steam front page, check out Tacticon, the Wholesome Games showcase or Earth Appreciation Festival for some examples. These sales pages stay available once the sale has concluded, though the main volume of traffic and attention comes in for the few days that the sale is prominently displayed and linked on Steam’s main page.

Valve profits through the Steam rev share, and indie devs get the kind of visibility that would otherwise require a fortune to be spent on ads on other platforms. With the newly released announcement, it looks as though Valve is cutting the metaphorical middle-man and organizing some niche themed sales themselves – and I am thrilled that “Horse Fest” is one of them.

Thanks to my game marketing friends, the idea to organize a horse themed sale sometime has been in my mind for at least a year, and we actually talked about the idea with a few people from Steam itself at Gamescom 2024. So while I can’t take actual credit for this, I choose to believe that I at the very least gave a relevant nudge in the right direction for Horse Fest to happen.

If nothing else, I sure consider this evidence that the horsie game niche is well on its way to getting more attention than it ever could have in the past.

These newly announced events will show up in a Discounts & Events section on the front page for Steam users

Horse Fest

The description for Horse Fest lets me assume that someone put some thought into this and doesn’t just want any and all games that happen to feature a mount to be included.

Specifically, Valve describes their eligibility criteria for the Fest as follows

These types of games are eligible:

- Horse Racing titles

- Horse husbandry / ranch titles

- Horse protagonists

If your game heavily features a horse, or a significant amount of the game occurs on horseback, you may be eligible if your game also features elements of taking care of said horse.

The following kinds of games are ineligible:

- Farming Sims where multiple animals can be taken care of, not just horses

- Games with a wide variety of animals, where horses are one of many options and not the primary focus

- Games set on horse ranches but do not include horses as part of gameplay

The announcement further describes that all animals from the Equidae family count for this, including zebras, donkeys and unicorns, and that the sale welcomes unreleased titles, discounted titles and games with only demos available.

I hugely appreciate this: the criteria leave room for a variety of games to be included, but restrict participation just enough for horses to have actual significance in the participating game. I love to see it.

How to join

If you’re a developer of suitable games, you should be able to register for the event on this site through your Steamworks login. If Valve hasn’t deemed your game(s) eligible already, you can appeal for inclusion on the same site.

As for players and horse game enjoyers, all you’ll have to do is wait until February 2026 to find the Horse Fest sale on your Steam front page and hopefully grab a bunch of cool horse games on discount, or discover upcoming titles to add to your wishlist!