New 'Trending Free' Steam chart stops free-to-play games and demos from spamming other lists on the storefront
Aug. 14, 2024You won’t find demos flooding Steam’s New & Trending chart again
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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 overhaulmade 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, somedevelopers worriedthat the changes would hurt the visibility that indie games enjoy from sometimes crawling up such lists.
Enter theTrending Freechart, 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 ourbest free gameslist for evidence), but it’s nice thatValveis 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 newblog 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.
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Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that’s vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he’ll soon forget.
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