Steam Gets New Free Game Trial Feature

By Logan Moore

Valve's Steam platform for PC has now kicked off a new feature that will allow users to experience trials of various games for no cost at all. Over the course of the past year, game trials have started to become a bit more prominent. This has most notably been seen in the PlayStation ecosystem, where Sony has made trials a perk of the higher tiers of PlayStation Plus. Now, Valve is looking to take a page out of Sony's playbook and is beginning to do trials of its own with a rather notable release from this year. 

As of today, Valve has made the 2023 remake of EA's Dead Space available to play for free for a limited period of time. Specifically, this trial of Dead Space will allow users to experience the opening 90 minutes of the survival-horror title. Once this time runs out, Steam users will then be able to decide if they'd like to continue playing the game by purchasing it outright. In the case of Dead Space, EA happens to have also discounted the title by 20% to coincide with this new trial that has gone live.

"Isaac Clarke is an everyman engineer on a mission to repair a vast mining ship, the USG Ishimura, only to discover something has gone horribly wrong. The ship's crew has been slaughtered and Isaac's beloved partner, Nicole, is lost somewhere on board," says the official story description of Dead Space. "Now alone and armed with only his engineering tools and skills, Isaac races to find Nicole as the nightmarish mystery of what happened aboard the Ishimura unravels around him. Trapped with hostile creatures called Necromorphs, Isaac faces a battle for survival, not only against the escalating terrors of the ship but his own crumbling sanity."

Moving forward, it seems safe to assume that Steam will soon let loose free trials of this type for other games that appear on Steam. Currently, it's now known what other games might become available to play in this manner, but the fact that Dead Space has been the first such offering suggests that other notable releases from 2023 could soon be accessible in a timed format on Steam as well. 

How do you feel about Steam now offering these timed trials of certain games? And will you look to download this demo of Dead Space for yourself now that it's on the platform? Let me know either down in the comments or message me on Twitter at @MooreMan12. 

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