Valve is launching the new year of gaming with a new Steam Game Festival coming next month. The event, which brings tons of PC game demos to the Steam store for a limited time, is the next in an array of Game Festivals presented by the company.
Initially run in partnership with Geoff Keighley and his The Game Awards back in December 2019, Valve has taken the action to broaden the program solo. While the original event held a curated list of demos, the Festivals that ran all through 2020 featured pages and pages of indie titles trying to entice attention and potential players.
While there was a period where indie games stood out on Steam simply by being on the front page, those days are long gone, and Valve has tried various ways to let its clients sort through the colossal number of titles seeing a launch in recent times. A few years ago, it debuted the Steam Curator system, which provided indie developers the opportunity to send games directly to review channels, influencers as well as community-driven organizations in trade for a renowned review on the store page. Valve has also been working hard on its recommendation algorithm and pushed titles via the Discovery Queue.
Regardless of how games are introduced to players, no store page will ever replace the act of hyping up a new game, which is why the Steam Game Festival makes so much sense. Valve revealed February’s version of the event a few days ago through a reveal trailer and a plethora of trailers digging into famous games in a host of genres.
From adventure to Action to Sports games and VR, players can identify a great starting spot before engaging in the catalog. The demos will be accessible for a week, beginning February 3 at 10 AM PST until February 9 at the same time.
Among the games debuting on Steam during the event with new demos are various titles that were previously exclusive to other platforms. Stylish action game Bloodrots was previously launched on the Epic Games Store to mild critical feedback, while Lost Words: Beyond The Page was one of the few exclusive titles to debut on Google Stadia in 2020.
There are also a few highly-awaited indie games with new playable demos such as the 3D Realms-published first-person puzzler Roguebook and Graven, a deck building game co-created by the maker of Magic: The Gathering, Richard Garfield. Obviously, if none of that sounds interesting, there will be hundreds of games also exhibiting playable portions, enough to hype every kind of player.
