I’m beginning to think I have far-too-strong feelings about changes to Steam minutiae. Why? Because when I heard that Valve had finally unleashed its updated storefront from beta, I fired up the site so quickly you’d have thought it was giving out candy. No one should care this much about website UI updates. I do. This is my cross to bear.
Anyway, Steam’s storefront update is out of beta and the frontpage is a whole lot slicker now. Also, wider. Valve has merged the two constituent parts of its old UI—that big list of categories down the left-hand side and the blue bar up top—into a single easy-to-navigate bar.
As part of that merge, the Categories section now displays, well, actual categories. Before, when it was consigned to the sidebar, the Steam categories you could select consisted of things like “Top sellers,” and “New releases.”
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Now, hovering over the new Categories display section shows much more useful game genres, letting you easily browse by things like racing, stealth, and what-have-you. Also, the categories that appear are personalised for you, which is either very convenient or yet another intrusion by the dead hand of surveillance capitalism. Whichever you prefer.
I like the look of it, though I suspect the most stalwart PC gamers among you might recoil a little at how clearly mobile-friendly the new layout is. Indeed, some of the community response on Reddit has been a little mixed. “Thanks Valve I am a grandma using Steam on a giant old touchscreen Samsung tablet,” writes dogdillon, who may in fact be a grandma on a giant tablet but is more likely a sarky Steam user. “Yet another site update that gets worse on pc in favor of mobile. Bigger icons, less information, more clicks to navigate menus…” concurs hooliganmike.
It’s a brave new world. (Image credit: Valve)
Still, at least some people do like it. “Good lord, it’s actually so, so much better,” writes Xedronic, “and the categories tab is ACTUALLY COMPREHENSIBLE to look at!”
Me? I like it. Or at least, I disliked how it looked before enough that this feels like an improvement. Hey, take the wins where you can: at least Valve hasn’t installed a helpful AI chatbot prompt up there.
