Steam adds new "Trending Free" tab to hide demos from new & trending

Shovelware demos are useless.
I remember the time I played the demo for farming sim and DOA:Dimensions to death on my 3DS. Those were actually good demos.

It's the current Steam publishing meta. A free demo will create traffic for the newly created Steam page of your game, resulting in more Wishlistings, which is usually the only way to be featured and seen anywhere before release for indie developers. And that's how your Wishlistings really explode and you make a lot of sales. Getting a demo out is by far highest priority for game publishing in 2024.

I have a feeling a lot of these demos were just trying to game that very "new and trending" page, and this change will produce fewer demos.

this is the best timeline

When your core gameplay loop is all of 15 minutes long that feeds into a 40-60 hour repetitive grind to unlock a slightly better item, new title or recolored cosmetic, combined with a complete absence of quality or competent writing, innovative mechanics while it's apparent most of the budget went into marketing and pre-rendered cutscenes that can be just watched on youtube, yeah it's bad to give potential customers a 30 minute demo that displays everything your game is without hinting any additional benefit for purchasing the full game.

Yeah I can't wait to try some new games today! Usually it's impossible to find a good F2P game unless it's really popular. Like Once Human, for example. I see why it's popular but the gameplay loop isn't for me. Too much gathering/crafting, and dungeons aren't fun as a solo player. I was bored after 2 days.

Thanks to this new category, now I can just go down the list until I find something I can enjoy.

I'm not against free games, and if I was interested in a free game I would actively search for one. But usually if you're searching for trending games it's because there's a sale going and you don't give a shit about the free to play games at that time. Especially considering that the big free games that are "trending" are the same games every single sale.

I like the better separation between the two for sure

It's less that I hate free games, it's more that a lot of games on Steam that are free are either the freemium model, where they are basically mobile games with inapp purchases you're expected to buy to make progress, or some some shovelware trash that's a one trick pony and generally just a knock off of something more popular and better executed.

Yes there are examples of great free to play games, but overall so many of them on steam are not worth downloading and clog up the trending list since if someone really wanted their game full of microtransactions to get noticed, they can just work a bot net to register new accounts and download the game to cause the steam algorithm to pick it up and put it on the trending page despite it having a poor user count.

Who is against free games?

This is literally an example of why Steam gets praised as the only good game store. They make a change, users complain that part of the change sucks, and they listen to the feedback

You should evaluate why you came to a barely populated thread, and made up a complete straw man to get upset over.

You're manufacturing outrage for yourself. That's not healthy.

What? Isn't this a common W for steam? This seems like a good thing to me.

This would've been a useless comment even if it were relevant.

What?

The irony of someone who uses "AI" and spicy autocorrect to rank employees trying to complain about a company people love to work at, and provides a good product.