I opened up Steam today to check on the state of the store - what sales were on, what the most popular games are right now, and most importantly of all, if anything new had slipped past my radar. Imagine my surprise (note: that the writer is completely stone-faced as he writes this sentence) when five out of the ten games in the New & Trending section of the🦋 front page of Steam are demos. If you haven’t noticed this trend, don’t worry - developers have.

Demos are great. I love demos. A free way to engage with a new game and see whether it’s actually🌳 something that would tickle my fan🥂cy? That’s a perfect communion ‘twixt developer and gamer. The issue, however, lies in just how many demos are being launched on Steam at any one time.

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In 2015, that tackled the issue of discoverability, especially for smaller studios, and concluded that the big topic at the time (that 1,592 games had launched on Steam within seven months) wasn’t actually a problem and that Steam’s approach to being an open-air market of gaming is a good one. The thing is, 1,534 games launched on Steam in July alone this year. Last year, 14,469 💮games were released on the platform - the vast, vast majority of these were from independent studios. And a lot of them have demos.

I’m not going to say that there are too many games on Steam. The st🐈orefront has a surprisingly good mechanism for leading you to the games it thinks you’ll like (sometimes, algorithms are good things) and the fine work by journalists and content creators who are committed to giving indies a spotlight goes a long way, but there is legitimately a discoverability problem now. Steam is becoming a mine filled to the brim with hidden gems because all its gems✨ are buried too deep to actually find.

Demos being a part of New & Trendin⛦g is a recent change to the storefront, and already it’s showing its flaws. Indie games gain a rather massive amount of their attention through mere exposure on the storefront - the longer, the better. Demos now take up one of ten preciou💞s slots, and with how regularly they are dropped into the ether that is Steam, it means that new launches have far less time being exposed to potential buyers. We’re living in a world where the next Celeste might get pushed out of relevance thanks to a demo for Star Wars Game From The ‘90s: The Remake.

There is no elegant or easy solution to this. Add a new tab only for demos, and the demos will be left ignored by a big proportion of the potential audience. Leave it as it is, and people will start timing their demo launches to prey on gaps in the market, making launch date warfare an even more cutthroat race that simply does not benefit the consumer. Ban demos from the storefront entirely and we’re back where we started. As it stands, though, Steam is letting down its indie developers by letting demos steal🌸 prime real estate and, truly, the spotlight.

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