Valve Updates Front Page of Steam

Have you been on Steam today?

If you have, then I’m sure you’ve noticed things look pretty different on the front page now.  It’s all blue, and the old, dry list of sales and newly released games have been replaced with something a little more… unique.  Yes, Valve has officially launched the new Steam Discovery Update, which seeks to take the impersonal nature of shopping for video games online and adds a personal touch… with the expressed interest in giving you, the player, easier access to the games you’d be interested in playing… not just what might happen to be on sale.

More or less, the new homepage will filter more stuff for you—if you’ve expressed dislike of a certain title or series, Steam won’t advertise it to you, nor will it advertise games you already own.  It will, however, put a greater emphasis on the types of games you do enjoy or rated highly, and have made community reviews more prevalent.   You can also customize what Steam shows you on the front page—if you don’t like the “recommended for you” section, get rid of it!   If you want to see the software Steam has on-hand, enable that list!  Pretty self-explanatory, but it should hopefully make for a more streamlined marketplace.

There’s also a new thing called the “Discovery Queue”—a list of games you haven’t seen on Steam yet but are popular.  From the Queue, you can add games to your wishlist, indicate you aren’t interested in them, or buy it outright—which will affect the kind of games that show up on your Queue in the future.

It also shows off things called Steam Curators: groups and individuals who are popular enough to have a following.  Just a way to get the community more involved with itself, I’m sure.

Perhaps best of all, the whole search engine has gotten an overhaul, so now it’s easier now to find exactly the game you’re looking for—you can search for specific tags as well as titles, and further limit your search by selecting things like genre, co-op, and so forth.

It’s actually not that earth-shattering, but when you have a virtual marketplace with as much crap in it as Steam, anything that can help you find what you’re looking for faster is big news, at least in my book.  Go ahead and check it out yourself, if you want!