Valve is kickstarting the new year of gaming with a new Steam Game Festival this coming February. The event, which brings hundreds of PC game demos to the Steam store for a limited time, is the next in a series of Game Festivals hosted by the company. Originally run in association with Geoff Keighley and his Game Awards back in December 2019, Valve has taken the initiative to expand the program solo. While the initial event held a curated list of demos, the Festivals that ran throughout 2020 featured pages and pages of indie games looking to attract attention and potential players.
While there was a time where indie games stood out on Steam simply by hitting the front page, those days are long gone, and Valve has tried several different ways to let its customers sort through the massive number of games seeing release in recent times. Several years back, it introduced the Steam Curator system, which gave indie developers the chance to send games directly to review outlets, influencers, and even community-run organizations in exchange for a prominent review on the store page. Valve has also worked hard on its recommendation algorithm and pushed games through the Discovery Queue.
No matter how games are pushed to players, no store page will ever substitute the act of firing up a new game, which is why the Steam Game Festival makes so much sense. Valve announced February's edition of the event this week with a reveal trailer as well as a series of further trailers digging into prominent games in a host of genres. From Action and Adventure to Sports titles and Virtual Reality, gamers can find a good starting spot before diving into the catalog. The demos will be available for one week, from February 3 at 10 AM PST to February 9 at 10 AM PST.
Among the titles premiering on Steam during the Festival with new demos are several which were previously exclusive to other platforms. Stylized actioner Bloodroots was previously released on the Epic Games Store to a tepid critical response, while Lost Words: Beyond The Page was one of the few exclusive games to premiere on Google Stadia in 2020. There are also plenty of highly anticipated indies with new playable demos, like the 3D Realms-published first-person puzzler Graven and Roguebook, a roguelike deckbuilder co-created by Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield. Of course, if none of that sounds enticing, there will literally be hundreds of games also showcasing playable chunks, enough to excite every type of gamer.
While it's easy to sigh at Valve's decision to turn what was initially a curated showcase for high-quality indie titles into a free for all, there's still a lot of value in regular Steam Game Festivals on the platform. Games need every opportunity to get players on board nowadays, and demos have mostly fallen out of favor on many platforms running today. Offering a small chunk for free has even become a strategy all its own outside of demos, with free so-called prologue titles appearing frequently on Steam's front page. There's obviously a need for demos at this level of development, and players will get more than they can ever play in the first week of February.
Source: Steam/YouTube
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January 29, 2021 at 04:53AM
