Steam store descriptions won’t be able to include links from “early” September

Valve is making some changes to written store page descriptions on Steam.

Starting in “early” September, the Steam team (the dream team’s lesser known cousin) will be “enforcing new rules for what can and cannot be included in your written store page descriptions”.

These changes are coming into force due to a recent “trend”, as Valve describes it, that has seen a number of developers using their store page descriptions as a platform to “present information or links” to other places.

It specifically said that developers had been using descriptions as a way of advertising other store pages on Steam, in some cases with as many as eight other games mentioned within the text before it got to the game the page is actually about. Valve said this can be distracting.

These changes to the current Steam rules will affect four specific areas:

• The “About The Game” section
• the “Short Description” section
• Any “Special Announcement” sections
• The “Awards” section

There will still be a section with dedicated link fields on store pages, for the likes of Discord, Facebook, X, Twitch, YouTube and a developer’s own website. Valve said developers can also highlight other games they make by creating bundles of related games, setting up a franchise page or by setting up a developer/publisher page with all the games made by the same entity.

Valve also wanted to help reduce confusion around games with a ‘prologue’ label. “We’ve seen developers doing novel things on Steam to help build an audience through a separate app that most call a ‘prologue’. In these examples, developers are buying a secondary appID and releasing it as a stand-alone free game to promote the upcoming release of their full premium game,” it explained. “This has been fine with us, but we’ve seen a few ways that it causes confusion for players and unnecessarily requires devs to pay a second app fee.”

Valve continued: “With a few changes to how demos work, we can replicate the positive benefits of a separate ‘prologue’ while also creating a tighter connection between the two entities so that customers are clear on how to learn more about the full game and to wishlist the correct thing.

“The changes already made to demos should make it unnecessary for developers to purchase a separate appID to use for prologues, and can instead use the demo appID that is already associated with their game.”

In another change, Steam now has a separate ‘Trending Free’ tab, as you can see in our screenshot below.

According to GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless, this change has been made in response to “complaints of ‘free demos are stomping on paid games in the New & Trending charts'”.

Elsewhere in Valve-related news, its hero shooter known as Deadlock and which the company still hasn’t actually announced has welcomed quite the number of players over the last week or so.

At the time of writing, SteamDB has recorded a concurrent player peak of over 23,000.