Valve has announced a “significant” expansion of the list of social networks that developers can post links to on their product pages on the Steam digital distribution service.
Image source: Steam
Let’s remember that until now, application pages on Steam could transfer users of the Valve digital store to only five platforms: YouTube, Twitch, Discord, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook✴.
After studying existing descriptions of games on Steam, Valve compiled a list of the most popular social platforms among developers that were not on the original list:
- QQ;
- VK (“VKontakte”);
- Bilibili;
- Weibo;
- Reddit;
- Instagram✴;
- Tumblr;
- Baidu Tieba;
- TikTok;
- Telegram;
- LinkedIn.
In an FAQ, Valve admitted that it was also surprised by the popularity of LinkedIn, but “the data doesn’t lie”: “Developers include links to LinkedIn in game descriptions, so we added this option.”
Valve has also added controls to determine the order in which links are displayed on game store pages.
In addition, Valve has added the ability for developers to control the order of packs in the list on the Steam page and expanded the options for displaying other games from the same studio or publisher in the corresponding section.
Valve has also added display settings for the first product in the “More Products” section and made several improvements to tools related to managing additional content.
On September 15, new rules for game descriptions on Steam also came into force: now they cannot contain links to third-party sites, imitate the interface and store buttons, or redirect users to pages of other products.