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Great change imo. The new & trending tab feels a lot more useful now that it isn't 50% demos.
This is why console demos are so rare anymore.
Try before you buy means fewer sales on launch day.
Informed consumers are careful with their money. And that's bad. Apparently.
When your core gameplay loop is all of 15 minutes long that feeds into a 40-60 hour repetitive grind to unlock a slightly better item, new title or recolored cosmetic, combined with a complete absence of quality or competent writing, innovative mechanics while it's apparent most of the budget went into marketing and pre-rendered cutscenes that can be just watched on youtube, yeah it's bad to give potential customers a 30 minute demo that displays everything your game is without hinting any additional benefit for purchasing the full game.
Oh my God this is so much nicer. I was getting so sick of trying to navigate the category and having the same live action free to play games appear every time. I have some games that I can remove from my ignore list now
I like free games, eg Shattered Pixel Dungeon, Minetest, Unciv, etc. Why would people be against free games, especially here where people are generally FLOSS advocates?
Who is against free games?
It's less that I hate free games, it's more that a lot of games on Steam that are free are either the freemium model, where they are basically mobile games with inapp purchases you're expected to buy to make progress, or some some shovelware trash that's a one trick pony and generally just a knock off of something more popular and better executed.
Yes there are examples of great free to play games, but overall so many of them on steam are not worth downloading and clog up the trending list since if someone really wanted their game full of microtransactions to get noticed, they can just work a bot net to register new accounts and download the game to cause the steam algorithm to pick it up and put it on the trending page despite it having a poor user count.
I'm not against free games, and if I was interested in a free game I would actively search for one. But usually if you're searching for trending games it's because there's a sale going and you don't give a shit about the free to play games at that time. Especially considering that the big free games that are "trending" are the same games every single sale.
I like the better separation between the two for sure
This is just great!
Yeah I can't wait to try some new games today! Usually it's impossible to find a good F2P game unless it's really popular. Like Once Human, for example. I see why it's popular but the gameplay loop isn't for me. Too much gathering/crafting, and dungeons aren't fun as a solo player. I was bored after 2 days.
Thanks to this new category, now I can just go down the list until I find something I can enjoy.
This is a shameless self-plug but I post a lot of free games in [email protected]. They're primarily limited-time giveaways, but I also tag some with [Forever-Free Friday] which might be more what you're looking for.