What do you think about Steam's Changes Coming to Store Page Written Descriptions?

I mean most of this sounds reasonable and simple enough. Personally, I haven't been on store pages where i noticed this to be an issue. But I don't buy that much to begin with.

The only argument that irritates me is that Steam/Valve claims that developers link to several other store pages first which makes finding information for the actual game more tedious. However, their suggestion is to do bundles and franchise packs instead ...... which has the exact same issue. They are standing at the top of the store page and just push down actual game info.

So, if Steam wants an improvement in that regard, they should make the store page with an in-build tab system. The default is game info and then they can add a second tab "Additional Content" and/or "Bundles". Sure, this might mean that the user will not notice bundle/franchise discounts on first look but I would assume the prior interest of most users is the game information.

Sounds reasonable. Are you aware that SteamGifts has a poll option?

I'm fine with this.
I don't use Elon net though. Maybe make a poll here?

Hi all!

Thanks for the replies so far! Yes, I was aware of a poll option on SteamGifts, however, I wanted all of the results to be compiled in one singular poll rather than be spread out, and a Twitter/X poll was more convenient for other people not on SteamGifts. Plus, having an existing audience base on Twitter/X meant I was able to tap in to see what people in my existing audience thought and then broadened it out to people outside of my "bubble" if that makes sense.

It's the first time I'm running a poll of this kind, so I'm keen to collect feedback though and will be seeing how it plays out for my next one (as I'm doing one on the changes to user reviews next week) I may try it with just posting a poll on SteamGifts and compare engagements!

Thanks!!

Also not a X/Tweeter.
I'm for the description and demo changes. I use Steam a lot to find aggregated review thoughts and descriptions of games, and the descriptions have gotten kind of ridiculous. And I don't mind some ASCII cats and such, but they're starting to be on every other page I read, between that and 'I have to eat a tablespoon of ketchup for each like' reviews, it gets kind of tedious.

Sounds good to me.

Completely fine with this.

Hopefully we get better infos what are in different editions, some store pages hardly tell what you get when you buy different packages.
Deluxe, Gold, Ultimate, Legendary and whatever other name they come up with.

The prologues got so annoying. More then 90% (personal estimate) are just demos but you can´t filter them out as such. They just clutter the upcomming and new release games lists. I do not need someone asking me if i am sure the game interstest me multiple times! which this basically does.

Sorry I don't use the app formerly known as Twitter (haven't since 2015 after a brief few months of noticing how much time it consumed for very little gained) so I'll just share my opinions here
Everything they mention seems like a positive change to me. I wasn't personally confused by prologues but I guess they hit a point where Support was being flooded with "why can't I play the whole game I got for free??" tickets and decided to make the change and I love demos so I'm all for it.

Generally speaking a little formatting is always a good thing on a site with so much information and so many pages to read. It makes it easier to find what you're looking for. As long as it doesn't come at the cost of freedom of expression and this doesn't seem to be too restrictive imo

Good luck with the article.

Not against it personally, but I get the criticism by indie devs.
The other games section should be limited, but not be removed completely.
A better solution against the scrolling would have been to add a "More" link at the end of the short description which would take you directly to the long description.
The native social media links are pretty small and boring, even people who are using Steam a lot forgot about them. I'm not a fan of social media, but I get how much new devs rely on it (especially Discord). Thus Valve should offer a better presentation style.
Demos instead of prologue/demo mixture? Gratifying.

My X use is separate from my SG use and so I won't be doing anything related there and I don't expect anything I do there to be related to here.

I'm fine with stopping scams and Steam seems to have laid out perfectly fine rules.

Perhaps they could add alternatives to the mainstream Discord, Facebook, Twitch, X, YouTube links in the future but that's about all I can see which could be considered restrictive.

You made an assumption that we would use X.
As you can see, a good bunch of us don’t.
I guess there’s no point in us commenting here at all.

I too don't use Twitter and would love to see a poll here. Anyway, I can say "finally" for these changes:

• No embedded imagery that mimics Steam store UI or buttons
• No images, links, or widgets pointing to other games on Steam

Sounds reasonable and the new rules are fine with me. They won't impact me or change anything for me at all.
I deleted my Twitter account as soon as I could after "The Destroyer of Humankind" took over, so not participating in any polls in NaXiland.

Oo finally free to play tab will not be full of demos

Thanks for the help and input contributed guys! I completed the article today and it can be read here! I used a great many of the responses used here and they were super helpful, thank you!

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Sentinels_of_the_Store/announcements/detail/4253173672922400381