{"id":1234992,"date":"2025-02-26T06:30:04","date_gmt":"2025-02-26T11:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1234992"},"modified":"2025-02-26T06:30:04","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T11:30:04","slug":"11-standouts-from-steam-next-fests-thousands-of-free-game-demos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1234992","title":{"rendered":"11 standouts from Steam Next Fest\u2019s thousands of free game demos"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>If you head over to <a href=\"https:\/\/store.steampowered.com\/sale\/nextfest?tab=23\">the Steam Next Fest charts<\/a> right now, Valve will offer you a glimpse of the 2,228 games offering free downloadable demos as part of the event through Sunday, March 3. That is way too many games to effectively evaluate in such a short time, even with the massive resources of the Ars Orbiting HQ.<\/p>\n<p>But we haven&#8217;t let that stop us from trying. With the assistance of some early access provided by Valve and game publishers, we&#8217;ve spent the last few days playing dozens and dozens of the most promising Next Fest demos in an attempt to pull out some interesting-looking needles from Valve&#8217;s massive haystack. Below are the results of that search\u2014a varied list of 11 titles we think are worth investing some time (and zero dollars of money) into a demo download.<\/p>\n<p>But this is just a starting point. Please use the comments below to share any other diamonds in the rough you think your fellow Ars readers need to know about.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/gaming\/2025\/02\/11-standouts-from-steam-next-fests-thousands-of-free-game-demos\/\">Read full article<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/gaming\/2025\/02\/11-standouts-from-steam-next-fests-thousands-of-free-game-demos\/#comments\">Comments<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you head over to the Steam Next Fest charts right now, Valve will offer you a glimpse of the 2,228 games offering free downloadable demos as part of the event through Sunday, March 3. That is way too many &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1234992\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,44,110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1234992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ars-technica","category-technology","category-unfiltered-rss"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1234992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1234992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1234992\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1234992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1234992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1234992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}