Valve has just announced that their Steam system will start allowing guest passes later this week, still in a closed beta basis. Guest passes work a bit like the free trial weekends, the difference being that an user who owns a game can send a guest pass to a friend at anytime so he can try that game out with the original user.

Later this week, new menu options will appear within Steam as we initiate the closed beta for Guest Passes, a new feature that will allow owners of certain Steam-enabled games (purchased either via Steam or at retail) to send a friend limited-time trials for those games.

Tom Edwards had the scoop on this feature almost two months ago, and it seems the feature is finally ready for prime time now. We can’t predict now how this will work out for a game’s penetration on the market (it will also largely depend on the limits set by the guest pass once it becomes live), but I think it’s a given that word-of-mouth will become quite a bit stronger now.

This entry was posted Monday, December 11th, 2006 at 4:49 pm and is filed under General. Both comments and pings are currently closed.