Starting in early September, Valve is making some changes to Steam Store page descriptions of “what can and cannot be included.” This excludes links to other websites, embeds that mimic the Steam Store interface, and links or embeds to other games on Steam.
A new Steamworks development post outlines the new rules and targets four areas of store pages: About the Game, Brief Description, Special Announcements, and Awards. “We will be enforcing new rules about what can and cannot be included in your written store page descriptions,” it begins. Valve says this is in part a continuation of a previous change to the visibility of demos in the storefront, giving demos their own separate pages and making them behave like free games in store listings.
Valve isn’t mincing words when explaining the changes. “We didn’t like the trend of store pages prominently linking to other store pages,” the post says. “We saw an increasing number of store pages that were essentially advertisements for OTHER (Valve capitals) store pages on Steam. This meant that on some game pages in the Steam store, you would find listings of two, three, or even eight other games before you could even read the description of the game you were looking at. We don’t think this is good for customers who want to learn about a game on Steam, so we wanted to update the rules to prohibit games from using the written description section to link to other games on Steam.”
The only exception here, Valve says, are separate prologue-style sections that some developers release on Steam as free samples instead of demos for upcoming games. Valve says it’s “fine” to release prologues like these, “except that they were confusing for players,” and says that with the changes to the demos, there should now be “no need for developers to purchase a separate AppID for prologues,” as they can instead “use the demo AppID that’s already associated with their game.”
Valve doesn’t outright ban prologues, but says demos “have become a much better way to build an audience and lead players to the full game.” However, links to other websites and stores are outright banned, and if a game already has such links on its store page, they will soon be removed.
“Starting in September, Steam will automatically detect and hide links in these sections,” Valve says, as I mentally update the target parameters of some sort of Steam-branded Terminator. “If these links are wrapped around text or an image, Steam will also hide the content within the (URL) block.”
New Steam “Trending Free” charts prevent free-to-play games and demos from spamming other lists in the store.
