Five years after Valve kicked off the first Steam Game Festival—now known as Steam Next Fest—the company is making changes to how it handles demos. In short, it's making them less of a chore to sniff out and deal with in your library.
In a blog post released yesterday, Valve announced that it was making changes to how it handles its appetisers based on "trends in feedback from both developers and players about the process and functionality."
First up, adding a demo to your Steam library no longer means having to immediately install it (or, in my case at least, having to close the tab that pops up asking you to install Steam after you hit the play button to get the demo). Like any of Steam's legion of free-to-play games, demos now have a handy "Add to Library" button to tuck them away in your games list without an immediate prompt to install. You can also now install demos for games you already own, if you just want the narcotic rush of a game's most audience-enticing parts.
Beyond the Add to Library button, demos also behave more like free games in that they can now have their own distinct store pages. Up to now, demos were restricted to a dinky green demo box on the page for the full game they're attached to. Well, no more. Now devs can create whole new pages "to better describe the contents of the demo, add separate screenshots, upload a trailer, and specify supported features." That also means demos will be subject to their own distinct user reviews and scores, so long as they have their own full page.
They don't have to have one, though. Some demos will still just hang out as an additional option on the full game's page if devs don't feel the need for a whole new one, with no distinct user review score.
But that's not all, folks. Demos will now show up on Steam's front page under charts like "New and trending" or relevant tag and category pages. Valve says it's also "made some changes to the thresholds for free products to appear in those sections to better balance them with paid products."
And finally, you can get Steam to send you notifications if demos become available for games on your wishlist, or from devs you follow. So maybe expect your inbox to pop off come October 14, when the next Steam Next Fest begins.
Oh, and Valve also explains to interested onlookers just what the strange circular icon is on all Steam's demos. Turns out it's "from the days when demos were commonly distributed through the post office, contained in a bound package of game journalism printed on dead trees and imprinted on circular media known as Compact Discs." I am older than sand.
Anyway, they all sound like smart changes to me, and my only real question is how it took this long for some of them to come into effect. Maybe it's just because Valve has so (relatively) few people working for it, or maybe the company just works in mysterious ways. You know, like how it only introduced the option to hide games from your Steam friends a cool six years after it started selling literal pornography. Things work differently in those rolly-desk, laissez-faire offices.
