I think this is a small victory for consumers, as some developers have made quite a mess of their Steam store pages now that Valve has announced some big changes.

You’ve probably seen it a few times: you go to a Steam page, scroll down to get information about the game, and you’re first shown a list of random games from the publisher that Nothing to do with the game you want to check out. Some publishers also really went overboard and basically released a bunch of games to turn them into advertisements for other games and that got pretty annoying.

In the announcement, Valve explained that new rules will apply to the About the Game, Brief Description, Special Announcements, and Awards sections, which include the following changes:

• No links to other websites – This means that you cannot use your store page to link to other websites, including social media pages. There are special link fields available in your store page editor for linking to popular social media platforms or your own website.
• No embedded images that mimic the Steam store interface or buttons – You should not use images or animations that are designed to look like the Steam interface, such as images that look like wishlist buttons, game capsules, or prizes.
• No images, links, or widgets pointing to other games on Steam – This means you can’t use your store page description to promote other products on Steam. If you have related products, you can set up bundles, franchises, or developer homepages.

As part of this and the major update to the standalone demo site, it should also stop all of the “free” prologues that have become much more regular (which are basically demos under a different name) where developers put banners for all of their prologues on their sites, as the games and demos can now be properly linked together.

In addition, Valve has tweaked the Steam homepage so that all the demos that appear on the New & Trending tab no longer push the actual new releases down. Instead, there is now a dedicated Trending Free tab that bundles them all together there. A nice change for developers and consumers.

Article from GamingOnLinux.com.