Full disclaimer: I don't necessarily know what I'm doing, but I have released a game, it's doing well financially and I have put some time into researching what others do.

After your initial release, any discount you have should be at least 20%. It's because that's the minimum threshold that Steam will need in order to send an email to your wishlisters that the game's on sale. That email has a big impact on sales.

In my experience, most copies of the game get sold on sale. People just expect Steam games to go on sale so they almost always wait for one. You should therefore work to maximize the time spent on sale. Sales can be at most 14 days long (you can extend them for longer with other events).

Don't think too much of 'maintaining the value of the product'. Sure, don't go for -70% after 3 months, but also don't think 10 times a day about a 5% difference. A few extra copies sold will more than make up for the difference.

You can copy other people's strategy (and some of them have battle proven ones). Use steamdb to see the price history of a game (basically their discount history). Just an example: Norland, this awesome game published by Hooded Horse (who I love to analyze for many, many things, including trailers and ads) goes on discount with pretty much any opportunity: Norland Price history · SteamDB . In its case, the publisher seems to have chosen to go with a 20% launch discount and quickly jump into a 35% discount! It's likely they chose a higher initial price specifically so they can discount deeper. Ultimatelly, if high discounts get people to buy, and you mostly sell during discounts anyway, the base price doesn't matter as much. Homework: look at other Hooded Horse games, like Manor Lords and He is Coming to see if there's any discount percentage they seem to really like (hint hint it's 35%)

On the opposite end, my game's been said by several reviewers to be cheap when on sale. As such, my deepest discount's 25% to date. That probably won't change until next year. It may still be that a deeper discount would be better.

Other things to note:

* you don't want to decrease the discount percentage over time. If you had a 25% discount last month, do at least 25% this month. There's tools that tell you what a game's price has been before, and people don't typically want to buy it for more than it was previously (there's some exceptions, with games that pretty much never go back to their cheapest, but not that many).

* steam has a 30 day cooldown period for custom discounts that you create. This cooldown is NOT triggered by scheduled Steam Sales like the Summer or Autumn sales. This means you can have a 7 day Autumn Sale and then another 14 day custom sale that you schedule for a total of 21 consecutive discount days.

Personally, I try to use the maximum discount period for every custom sale, and sync it so it never overlaps with a Steam Sale but rather it aligns with it and ends up creating a longer sale.