Steam Store descriptions cannot include links from “early” September

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

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

These changes come into effect due to a recent “trend,” as Valve describes it, that has seen several developers use their store page descriptions as a platform to “feature information or links” to other places.

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He specifically said that developers had used the descriptions as a way to advertise other store pages on Steam, in some cases with as many as eight other games mentioned in the text before getting to the game the page actually talks 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 Announcements” sections
  • The “Awards” section

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

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

Valve continued: “With a few changes to how demos work, we can replicate the positive benefits of a separate 'prologue,' while creating a closer connection between the two entities, so customers have a clear understanding of how to learn more about the full game and how to add the right thing to their wishlist.

“The changes already made to demos should make it unnecessary for developers to purchase a separate app ID to use for prologues, and instead be able to use the demo app ID already associated with their game.”

Another change is that Steam now has a separate “Trending Free” tab, as you can see in the screenshot below.

According to GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless, this change was made in response to “complaints that 'free demos are trampling paid games in the New & Trending charts.'”

Form

Image Credit: Valve/Eurogamer

In other Valve news, its hero shooter known as Deadlock, which the company has not yet announced, has welcomed a fair amount of players over the last week or so.

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

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