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Steam is packed to the brim with incredible free games, but some developers take advantage of the free games section and release demos meant to tempt you into buying a full game. Here’s why you should ignore these Steam prologues — and how you’re able to identify them.
What Are Steam Prologues?
Steam prologues, unlike normal games, lack any sort of conclusion and are meant to sell you on purchasing a full game. If you’re justlooking for good free games on Steam, encountering these demos without knowing you can’t finish them is immensely frustrating.
Considering that there’s already a category for prologues (the demo category) and that Steam has recently improved the visibility and features of demos on Steam, there’s no reason for developers to mislabel their games.
You’re better off focusing on games that you may enjoy fully, and that come from developers who respect what you want. Luckily, you havetons of free PC games to choose fromon Steam — you’ll just need to put a bit of extra effort into sorting them out from the demos.
Demos used to suffer from poor visibility and a lack of features, so many developers who released prologues in the past aren’t malicious. If you are considering purchasing a game, give some older prologues a try. You might find something fun and help an indie developer.
How to Determine if a Steam Game Is Free or a Demo
The only reliable method of determining whether a Steam game is free or a demo is looking for ‘Prologue’ in the title. Steam doesn’t support filtering out words that appear in titles, so there’s no way to eliminate them from your search.
Because Steam recently improved demos by making them more visible and allowing them to have a separate store page, ‘Prologue’ submissions in the free game category have decreased substantially. That being said, there’s still thousands of listings from the past.
If you want to completely filter out prologues, your only option is to utilize Google (or another search engine that supports operators). You can modify and use the following search query to find free non-prologue games on Steam:
This method isn’t perfect, but it is an improvement on Steam’s heavily flawed search feature. Performing the above search with the term “fish” brought me to Fishing Planet, while the term “rock” showed me Rock Life: The Rock Simulator as a second result.
It’s unlikely that I would have found either game so quickly using Steam’s built-in search. If you’re more interested in playing the newest free games, you can eliminate the search terms and filter results to those made within a specific timeframe.
Using Google search to find Steam games will limit you to games that have had their pages indexed by Google, and it is imperfect in other ways. Still, it’s the only viable alternative to Steam’s flawed search.
All that being said, there’s no replacement for the quality that built-in operators would add to Steam search. Steam made those recent changes to demos because of user feedback, and they may make similar changes to search in the future if users show that they want it.
Just using Google, you’ll still be able to find hundreds of incredible free-to-play games. And while Steam prologues are still worth ignoring if you want a full game, the recent changes to demos mean that there’s a whole new treasure trove of games waiting for you if you decide to delve into that category.
