Special report
The ins and outs of Steam’s smart new redesign
Remember when Steam was a drab olive green? That was a long, long time ago, and yet Steam’s library, the place we go to launch games every day, has rarely changed in that time. In fact, rumours and leaked images have pointed to a new library design since 2017. Valve’s been taking its time, but it’s finally here: a spiffy new library with smarter tools for organising games and big, shiny box art that makes browsing a pleasure.
“There are three main goals,” said Valve’s Alden Kroll when he showed off the library redesign at an event in Seattle. “To help players find the games that are in their library and find what to play next. Secondly, to stay up to date with the things happening in the games, what their friends are up to, things like that. And then also, for those who have been collecting games for years in Steam, help them organise their games and find what they might not even remember they have in their library collection.”
At time of writing, Valve hasn’t yet rolled the design out to everyone, but you can try it yourself by opting into the Steam client beta (Settings > Account > Change beta participation). It’s still a work in progress, but rest easy if you’re expecting the kind of beta where you clip through the floor or get shotgunned from across the map.
The client is perfectly stable, but the design is still in flux, as Valve sees how people react to its first major library changes in many years.
‘Modern’ is the best word to describe this glow up: big vertical icons give box art more room to shine on a new library Home page, and the whole window follows the ‘flat’ aesthetic popular in recent software design. The flatter style and big art does make Steam feel like it’s catching up to the design trends of the past five years, though. The Home page strongly evokes home theatre app Plex, and will feel instantly familiar if you’ve ever used an Apple TV or other streaming device.
HOMEWARD BOUND
The most important new feature is the Home page, which is, well, just what it sounds like. The library no longer defaults to the game page of whatever you played last. Home is divided into rows, with the first two showing you what’s new from the games in your library – updates, special events, posts from the developers – and what you’ve played recently, so you can easily jump back in. Below that, the layout is mostly up to you: with a couple of mouse clicks you can add ‘shelves’ of games organised by Steam’s new collection tools.
A tool called Dynamic Collections is easily Valve’s best addition: they’re basically Gmail filters for games. You create a collection by choosing from a variety of tags, say ‘RPG’ and ‘multiplayer’ and ‘controller support’, and Steam will automatically pull in all the appropriate games in your library. The ‘dynamic’ (and exciting) bit is that Steam will add any future games you buy with those tags to the collection, too, requiring no manual fiddling.
The most basic use for dynamic collections is simply organising by genre, which used to be tedious.
For years I relied on the third-party tool Depressurizer, but I only ran it every so often, and in the meantime new games would pile up in my library list without getting the right tags. Bless dynamic collections for making it easy to round up all of the (once and future) first-person shooters in my library with just a couple of clicks.
TAG LINE
Dynamic collections are ultimately at the mercy of Steam’s tags, though, and you’ll likely need to do some manual pruning on them before they’re quite right. Thankfully you can right-click individual games to
The most basic use for dynamic collections is simply organising by genre..
remove them, or else I’d have to live with FreeStyle2: Street Basketball (why do I own this??) living in my FPS collection.
With more options, like supporting basic logical functions (for example ‘and’ and ‘or’) dynamic collections could be killer. Right now, if you use more than one tag, they can only include results where the venn diagram overlaps. This ends up being pretty limiting.
Say I want to create a collection of all my shooters. I have 61 games tagged ‘FPS’ and 31 games tagged ‘third-person shooter’. But a dynamic collection with both tags shrinks to only nine results, because only nine of my games are tagged both thirdperson shooter and FPS. Here I need an ‘or’ instead of an ‘and’.
The library redesign has a couple of other little helpful features, like nondynamic collections you can simply drag-and-drop games into, and a handy button at the top of the column that will hide everything that isn’t currently installed. Each individual game’s page now has splashy banner art across the top, and a box that highlights recent achievements and screenshots from the last play session, which is a welcome shortcut. But there’s also a prominent ‘activity’ section, like a Facebook wall for you and your Steam friends, on every single game page.
Who, in 2019, is going to choose this as the place to talk about games? Scroll down, and the rest of the new game page design is also an unsightly mess of community screenshots, guides, and videos, which can include spoilery content and, inevitably, memes. It feels like Valve trying to shoehorn in community engagement that I’d rather hide.
With the library’s new design it feels strange to click over to the store or the (especially outdated) community hub. As growing pains go, it’s a minor one. Valve has said that “the new library will inform future store discovery features” and its design will probably trickle over to the community hub, too. Eventually… Steam still operates on Valve Time, after all.