The calendar for video game fans has a few notable highlights checkered throughout the year–shows like Summer Game Fest and The Game Awards, tentpole publisher presentations, and increasingly, the regular occurrence of Steam Next Fests. The Next Fest has been growing in size and stature for years, and now it’s among the best ways to get a glimpse at future big PC games and sleeper hits alike. It is also now, unfortunately, a regular reminder that the Steam Deck’s sorting features are severely lacking.
As someone who’s naturally curious to see what’s next, both personally and for this job, I’m always excited to check out Next Fest. The biggest draw of Next Fests are the slew of demos, numbering in the thousands. I don’t have the time or the storage space to check out more than a few dozen at most, but I’m always eager to browse and find the ones that catch my eye. Which makes it all the more baffling that Steam’s signature piece of hardware, the Steam Deck, has no dedicated Demos section.
I suspect how Valve envisions this working is that users will browse the store and download demos directly from their Steam Deck, at which point they’ll be added in chronological order to the home screen hub. And that works well enough, if you’re only trying a handful of demos at a time.
Those aren’t my habits, though. I tend to browse through the store on my laptop, where I can more quickly open tabs for games I find interesting and then click to add them to my library. As far as the Steam Deck is concerned, I may as well be adding them to Mars. They’re nowhere to be found on the home screen, and they sporadically show up in my library.
At one point I had a solution for this, having created a custom Demos folder using the Decky Loader plugin. But Decky has been misbehaving lately, functionally bricking my Steam Deck until I go through an arduous process of disabling it in safe mode, so that’s a non-starter.
But why should I need a custom folder? Why doesn’t Valve, which hosts a regular tentpole event that revolves around offering thousands of enticing demos, simply add a section to its extremely successful handheld hardware for demos? It’s frustrating to feel like I’m fighting my favorite system, at one of my favorite gaming events, just to try out some upcoming video games.
And while Next Fest throws this problem into the most stark relief, this functionality would be useful year-round. Publishers release demos for their games all the time, and it is often difficult to sort and find them on the Steam Deck. Having a single dedicated section to find all of the games I want to sample would make the experience much cleaner and more enjoyable.
Steam Next Fest is upon us, and with no word of an update to the Deck UI, I can only assume this problem won’t be addressed in time for this one. There’s always hope for the next Next Fest, though. Until then, one of my favorite events on the gaming calendar comes with a small but persistently annoying caveat.
