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- We didn’t like the trend of store pages linking prominently off to other store pages.
We have been seeing more and more store pages that are effectively advertisements for OTHER store pages on Steam. This meant that on some game pages in the Steam store, you would find lists of 2, 3, or even 8 other games before you even got to read the description of the game you were looking at. We don’t think that’s great for customers trying to learn about a game on Steam and so we wanted to update the rules to prohibit games from using the written description area for linking to other games on Steam. However, there is one particular interesting use case of this cross linking that we wanted to continue supporting, which is the ‘prologue’ scenario. So that leads us to point number 2. (Sequels and franchises are also an interesting use of cross-linking, but Steam already has other features such as bundles or franchise pages to address that need) - We saw game developers releasing ‘prologue’ games on Steam, which was fine except that they were confusing for players.
We’ve seen developers doing novel things on Steam to help build an audience though 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. 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. 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. - We have had an outstanding list of improvements that we’ve wanted to make for demos since they have become a key part of events such as Next Fest.
When we consider the kinds of things that developers have been attempting to accomplish with ‘prologue’ apps, and with the feedback we’ve gathered from players and developers about how demos behave on Steam, we ended up with quite a list of improvements we could make to demos that would make a lot of things better for all parties. So, we shipped those updates last month and it seems like everyone is pretty happy with the results (of course we’re paying attention to the feedback we’re seeing and will be continuing to refine how things work).
OK, now that formatting works I’ll actually comment lol. They removed external links and links to other games, and the quote is how/why it’s closely intertwined with the demo update.
- We didn’t like the trend of store pages linking prominently off to other store pages.