Steam Finally Made It Easier to Find Trending Free Games

It seems like Steam has finally listened to users and made it easier to find free games. Here’s how to find the new “Trending Free” tab to download new games that won’t cost you a penny.

Find Free Games That Are Trending

There are now so many free games on Steam that sorting through them can get frustrating. The new “Trending Free” tab includes both free games and free demos, but not free to play events that make paid games free for a short time.

Open Steam and start on the Store screen, then scroll down. You can get to the redesigned “Free to Play” menu in the “Browse by Category” section. However, on that page, there is no option to see what’s trending. There’s a “New and Trending” category, but it only shows me new games.

Below the “under $10 section” there’s a menu with several tabs. The default is “New and Trending,” and the last tab is “Trending Free.” There it is!

There are annoying “Free Demo” games that I’d argue shouldn’t be there since they aren’t complete games. At the bottom, there is a “See More” option. If we click on “Free to Play” there, it takes us to the same cool “Free to Play” dashboard we saw earlier.

You may notice that the first tab on that nice “Free to Play” dashboard is “Popular.” Isn’t that the same as trending? Steam does not disclose the difference between “Popular” and “Trending.” However, “Popular” and “Trending Free” do not have a single game in common at the time of this writing.

More Rankings, Please

The new “Trending Free” tab is hidden and hard to find, but it seems to me that it’s more influenced by trends and less by ads or sponsors. If Steam is accepting UI recommendations, I’d like to see a ranking system similar to Amazon’s book ranking where popularity is determined by sales.

This would be especially helpful for those who enjoy indie games that can be difficult to locate if they’re less popular. I could see players scrolling through the top two or three hundred games in their favorite category in just a few minutes.