Video Games

Steam update improves how demos work on the platform

Good news for everyone

Marco Wutz

Valve

Valve has detailed a Steam update revolving around playable video game demos. These have made a bit of a comeback recently, in part due to the platform’s own Steam Next Fest events, but that also led to some issues on the platform. Developers often released their demos as a free game in order to push their visibility, which clogged up the free game category on Steam and unnecessarily confused users. Adding a demo to your library when already owning the full game wasn’t possible either, which made it difficult for developers to test their own demos and complicated everyone’s library management.

The Great Steam Demo Update 2024, as Valve calls the patch, is changing these and other aspects.

Steam users can now add demos to their library without immediately installing them, regardless of their ownership of the full game. It’ll also be easier to remove demos from your library – simply right-click on the demo, navigate to ‘manage’ and press ‘remove from account’ and it’s done. This will uninstall and automatically remove the demo from your library, cleaning it up nicely.

Developers can now decide whether they want their demo to appear on their game’s store page – the way it is now – or if they want their demo to have its own, separate page. These will pretty much function like regular store pages, including descriptions, trailers, screenshots, and users reviews, but they’ll link to the full title’s store page as well as allowing for the installation of the demo.

Visibility largely remains the same between two options, unless the review scores on a separate demo page swing too high or too low, causing it to be boosted by the algorithm or filtered out.

Demos can now appear in the same sections and lists regular free games show up in, such as ‘New & Trending’ and so on. Changes to the algorithm should keep these lists from being overwhelmed by demos, but that’s obviously an area Valve will have to monitor – it could be devastating for developers if their newest launch were to be blocked from being visible by a bunch of demo versions.

Plus, people having a game on their Wishlist will be informed if the developer has launched a demo for it.

Published
Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg

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