Steam now has a Trending Free tab for demos, full free games and free-to-play

rockpapershotgun.com:

Finding and sharing Free Stuff is one of the time-honoured duties of the video game journalist or SEO-monger. Back when I was OXM's online editor, "free Xbox games" was one of our golden Google pillars, the other two being "Minecraft Xbox 360 update" and "Skyrim something something". Well, uncle Valve has just rudely torpedoed that ancient investigative initiative by adding a Trending Free tab to the Steam frontpage, encompassing prologues, demos, free-to-play games and that most treasured of jewels, a full free game with no monetisation elements, such as Grimhook.

Do not cry for us pitiful electronic scribblers, crowded on our melting internet icebergs. Play free games instead! Thanks to that new tab, I've just discovered a demo for neato wide-format tower defender Frontline Crisis. Hah, that'll keep the awareness of steady livelihood erosion at bay.

The addition of the tab follows a series of changes to how demos work on Steam in July. You might have noticed that you can now add them to your library without immediately installing them, and that you can install them even if you own the full game ("primarily, this will make it easier for developers to test demos," say Valve).

Developers can now give demos their own store pages, though adding a demo button to the full game's store page is still an option. This means that players can leave user reviews for them, as with full free or free-to-play games. Valve have also made changes to the Steam homepage so that demos appear in the New & Trending and New on Steam charts, together with tag and category pages. These appear to have paved the way for trending free games getting their own tabs. Lastly, you can now get an email notification when a demo is published for a game on your wishlist.

Adding a Trending Free tab obviously indicates Valve's sense of how important free-to-play games are to Steam's audience numbers - the top most played games on the platform are pretty much always free-to-play titles, including Valve's