New Steam Game Festival Scheduled For February

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Valve is kickstarting the new year of gaming with a new Steam Game Festival this coming February. The event, which brings hundreds of PC game demos to the Steam store for a limited time, is the next in a series of Game Festivals hosted by the company. Originally run in association with Geoff Keighley and his Game Awards back in December 2019, Valve has taken the initiative to expand the program solo. While the initial event held a curated list of demos, the Festivals that ran throughout 2020 featured pages and pages of indie games looking to attract attention and potential players.

While there was a time where indie games stood out on Steam simply by hitting the front page, those days are long gone, and Valve has tried several different ways to let its customers sort through the massive number of games seeing release in recent times. Several years back, it introduced the Steam Curator system, which gave indie developers the chance to send games directly to review outlets, influencers, and even community-run organizations in exchange for a prominent review on the store page. Valve has also worked hard on its recommendation algorithm and pushed games through the Discovery Queue.

No matter how games are pushed to players, no store page will ever substitute the act of firing up a new game, which is why the Steam Game Festival makes so much sense. Valve announced February's edition of the event this week with a reveal trailer as well as a series of further trailers digging into prominent games in a host of genres. From Action and Adventure to Sports titles and Virtual Reality, gamers can find a good starting spot before diving into the catalog. The demos will be available for one week, from February 3 at 10 AM PST to February 9 at 10 AM PST.