Steam’s new slew of 59 free demos is a perfect quarantine “game expo”

Enlarge / The future of video game expos has arrived-and just in time, in case you (like many of us) are stuck at home for the foreseeable future. (credit: Valve)

For the second time in three months, Steam is hosting a virtual video game expo where users from around the world can download time-limited demos of unreleased games. This time, circumstances are wildly different.

The biggest difference with today's launch of the Steam Game Festival: Spring Edition has little to do with the implementation itself. Like the offer we saw in December, which was attached to a livestreamed Game Awards presentation, users can head to Steam right now and download a bunch of demos of games that are not officially available for purchase. Only this time, the count has grown significantly to 59 games (the list is below).

What's different is how these games are sorted and why that is the case. Most of these game demos were prepared for presentations at the developer-centric Game Developers Conference 2020, which was supposed to take place in San Francisco through this week. That expo, like many others, was summarily postponed last month in the face of mounting pressure from health experts and city and state officials. As a result, you'll notice designations for most of the games such as "Indie Megabooth," "Wings Fund," "Indie MIX," and "Day of the Devs," which are organizations that typically present new and independent video game demos at GDC-affiliated events.

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