Finding and Sharing Free Stuff is one of the time-honored tasks of video game journalists or SEO traders. When I was the online editor of OXM, “free Xbox games” was one of our golden Google columns, the other two being “Minecraft Xbox 360 update” and “Skyrim something something.” Well, Valve has rudely undermined this old research initiative by adding a Trending Free tab to the Steam homepage, which covers prologues, demos, free-to-play games, and one of the crowning jewels, a completely free game with no monetization elements, like Grimhook.
Don't cry for the poor electronic writers who crowd our melting internet icebergs. Play free games instead! Thanks to this new tab, I discovered a demo for the wonderful large-format tower defense game Frontline Crisis. Hah, that'll keep the awareness at bay about the constant erosion of livelihoods.
The addition of the tab follows a series of changes to how demos work on Steam back in July. You may have noticed that you can now add them to your library without installing them immediately, and you can install them even if you own the full game (“first and foremost, this will make it easier for developers to test demos,” Valve says).
Developers can now give demos their own store page, but adding a demo button to the full game's store page is still an option. This means players can leave user reviews for them, just like they would for full free-to-play or free-to-play games. Valve has also made changes to the Steam homepage, so demos appear in the New & Trending and New on Steam lists, along with tag and category pages. These appear to pave the way for trending free games to have their own tabs. Finally, you can now receive email notifications when a demo is released for a game on your wishlist.
The addition of the Trending Free tab clearly shows how important Valve feels about free-to-play games being to Steam’s viewership numbers – the most-played games on the platform are almost always free-to-play, including Valve’s own Counter-Strike 2. Of course, games already have to be popular to appear in the tab, and so there’s likely to be a quality control issue with the tab. Still, it’s a handy addition for those who haven’t yet learned the mighty ways of SteamDB. Or, bookmark our free games page .
In more business news, Valve also announced that they’re blocking links to other websites on their Steam store pages. As Brendy observed when he handed me this particular morsel of news, Valve seems annoyed that many game pages exist primarily to direct and promote other games by the same developer or publisher. They’re single-handedly giving it away, etc.