Steam offers first 90-minute game trial

Valve has started offering its first 90-minute game trial over on Steam.

Starting with this year’s Dead Space remake, you should now start to see select Steam games offering the ability to play 90 minutes for free. It’s a more in depth demo system, essentially.

It’s being seen as a way to counteract excessive refund requests. Steam offers the ability to request a refund within two hours of starting to play a game, but presumably offering a free 90 minute trial will cut down on the use (and abuse) of that system significantly.

On the consumer side, it promises to avoid you having to shell out good money (even if only temporary) on yet another poorly optimised or flat out broken PC game, of which there have been far too many of late.

All you need to do is head to the Dead Space page on Steam and click to Play Now. You’ll then be able to play as much of the game as possible within a hard 90-minute limit. Incidentally, Dead Space is currently selling 20% cheaper that usual, and has been on offer elsewhere of late. If you do like the free trial, now’s a good time to buy the game outright.

It seems this free trial offer is only running until May 29, so don’t expect future free trial deals to extend indefinitely.

We don’t have any official word on the identity of any future games that might use this new 90-minute free trial system on Steam. It would seem to be a good bet that EA will follow up with another at some point, though.