Valve Updates the Functionality of Demos of Steam

There’s almost nothing worse as a gamer than buying and downloading a game only to find out it really isn’t your cup of tea. Bad performance on your machine, complex menu layouts, funky controls, or story and/or level progression are just a few things that could turn the tides on a game that looked like you might enjoy it just from the Steam page. One of the best answers to this scenario is the option for the developers to add a demo for players to try out, as it lets the player get a true feeling for a game before purchasing it. 

As the volume of available games have surged in the recent decade and game development is becoming more accessible, the indie market has become more competitive. Demos have evolved from a handy tool for those already interested, into an integral part of the marketing process. Sensing this change in the indie market,  in 2021 Valve rebranded their “Steam Game Festival” to “Steam Next Fest” where games (mostly indies) with demos are featured on the site, with their demo functioning as a proverbial “pamphlet” that gamers can quickly grab if they’re interested. With the popularity of each Next Fest growing rapidly, more and more developers have opted to add demos in order to join in on the festivities. As any good business would, Valve just launched “The Great Steam Demo Update 2024” which will better organize and streamline the process around both offering and playing demos.

In this update, demos can now be added to a user’s library without immediately installing them. This could come in handy for those who don’t want to be taken off the page when shopping around for a demo to play. From a marketing standpoint, each redirect away from a main page will lose you certain amount of viewers, and this function will increase the chance that a user would grab multiple demos at a time.

In the past, developers have launched their demos as a free to play option, which didn’t quite fit the category. Demos for paid games ended up amidst the listings for true free-to-play games, and Valve has remedied this by offering the opportunity for a demo to  either appear on the Steam’s main page with a handy new widget that will link to the game’s main listing, or if they would like the demo to appear within the game’s main page -eliminating the need to for separate listings. Separating the demo onto another page will enable players to easily clear up their library when they download the full game, and it will make it easier for developers to have both the demo and full game installed if they need to go back and forth between each version for testing. This also provides a chance for developers to put out a demo version of a game without worrying that the initial negative reviews on a demo will impact the reviews for the final edition of the game. While some gamers might be motivated enough to go back and change their negative reviews, others might be quick to leave a negative review on a demo and leave it at that. This gives the game a more fair shot at being reviewed on its true merit, rather than how rough it might have been during development. On the flipside, if a demo garners fantastic reviews, those would not carry over to the full version. 

Demos will also now gain more visibility outside of Next Fest by now having the same possibility of getting featured among other games in all categories like ‘New and Trending’ and ‘New on Steam.’  This also means players may discover a demo when searching for a certain kind of game that interests them, increasing the chances that the demo will reach its target audience. 

Developers will also now have the chance to notify users who have wishlisted their game when they have launched a demo. This comes in the form of an email that developers have a bit of control over in terms of timing. If they’d like that email to send out a few days in advance of Next Fest, they can hold off until the day of the event even if their demo launches beforehand. 

Both new and already-launched demos can be toggled on and off being featured of the main page. This gives the developers the chance to pull it from being featured on the main page of Steam and its categories if the launch hasn’t gone as planned, or they would like to have more control over the audience their demo is exposed to. It also gives developers with previously-launched demos the chance to participate in the newly launched changes.

These changes and improvements feel like a natural progression of the demo option on Steam by making it more valuable to developers and improving the user-experience for gamers. It also gives indies a bit of a leg up in a niche market with a huge presence taken up by big name Studios and Publishers.

What do you think of the changes?