Steam has introduced a new 'Trending Free' chart to make sure free demos, prologues, free-to-play releases, and full free games aren't contaminating other lists.
Valve's Steam demo overhaul made bite-sized teasers act more akin to full games on the storefront, complete with their own separate pages and user reviews. But as free demos began to flood Steam's New & Trending chart, some developers worried that the changes would hurt the visibility that indie games enjoy from sometimes crawling up such lists.
Enter the Trending Free chart, which does exactly what its name suggests: groups together everything that's new, free, and popular. That includes demos and prologues that tease other full games, as well as free-to-play games and games that are plainly "Free" to keep - think vanilla Doki Doki Literature Club.
Finding free gems and recommending them on a platter of 250-or-so words used to be the responsibility of game-writing netizens (check out our best free games list for evidence), but it's nice that Valve is now automating the process. Among the current chart-toppers are Black Myth: Wukong's benchmark tool and the chaotic co-op sim Supermarket Together, which lets you live out the unrealistic fantasy of being indefinitely employed in this economy. Plenty of other stuff to discover, too.
Valve also announced a couple of other new rules and changes via a new blog post, explaining that store pages will soon be unable to link to other websites or social media pages. "There are specific link fields provided within your store page editor for linking to common social media platforms," Valve says.
Promoting other products on a Steam page is also being banned because "you would find lists of 2, 3, or even 8 other games before you even got to read the description of the game you were looking at," the blog continues, before pointing out that developers can "set up bundles, franchises, or developer homepages" to promote related games. Overall, the update seems to be aiming to reduce clutter on the storefront.
Check out some upcoming indie games of 2024 and beyond for more.
