Long-overdue revision of Steam libraries in September

Since Valve started referring to a mysterious renovation of the Steam Library (and accidental leaks from it), the eras came to an end, the empires rose and fell, and we all became tired and bowed . Or at least it's like that. The time for change has come soon: Valve will begin deploying the new Steam library, which should be improved, starting September 17 in beta.

Valve introduced the new library during a closed session in Seattle last week. Kotaku attended. For starters, Valve designer Alden Kroll presented a new homepage for the library with "What's New", "Recent Games" and "Recent Friend Activity" items, as in Steam. These will be composed based on what the developers and their friends are preparing, rather than a single, universal feed of information from Valve. The focus is on showing what interests friends over time, as opposed to what they are doing right now, as in the features of the traditional list of friends. Below is a visual representation of all your games, which you can sort at your leisure. This includes the option to drag and drop games into "collections", which replace the current category feature of Steam and work dynamically. This means that if you create a tag-based collection – for example, "RPG" and "controller support" – any new game you buy will automatically be added to that collection.

The pages of the individual game library are also redesigned. They look much more stylish now, with an art that developers can rotate and a flow of activities showing what friends have done in this game below. There is also a sign on the right with your achievements and screenshots. When you scroll down this page, these sections give way to the content of the community as a whole: guides, videos, screenshots, and so on. When you leave games, you also get a summary of things such as the successes and trading cards you earned during your game session, as well as screenshots you took. Finally, developers will be able to add event banners to game library pages. Valve demonstrated this with a Dota 2 mock up with a splashed banner advertising the 2019 International Tournament Pass.

This new event system, said Kroll, will soon be at the heart of Steam. When a developer organizes an event, it will not simply be placed in the library page of a game. It will also appear on the community hub, the library's landing page, the store, emails that players can choose to receive and other sections. Valve predicts that developers will use it to advertise everything, from updates to the challenges at stake, and believes the system is needed in an era increasingly focused on constantly updating games' service ".

As for what Valve is doing to prevent developers from playing these systems, as some have recently done in the "Upcoming News" section of the Steam store, the company offers a handful of solutions.

"For every player he will be personalized based on what he's played a lot, what he's been playing recently and what he's played a lot in the past," Kroll said. from the "What's New" section at the top of the Steam Library. "There will also be a rate limit to make sure we do not show six updates of the same game at the same time. There will certainly be a lot of these things in there. We also want to know the reactions of the players during the beta phase in order to adjust them. "

To close the session, Kroll spent a few minutes thinking about the launch of Steam's new experimental section, Steam Labs, and the future of the store. New experiments are underway, including six-second "microtrailers" for all games, new search page options that allow users to limit results with discounts and tags, as well as a function of "deep dive" which will be detailed later. future. In the long run, Valve hopes to make the game discovery process on Steam more entertaining.

"It's sort of a recurring theme in Steam Labs," said Kroll. "We think about" How to make the process of discovery and game exploration more entertaining? "Games are obviously entertainment, and watching trailers is fun, watching screen shots, reading descriptions is very entertaining, too, so we think the next version of the store probably should not be just of rows of game branding. This should be something more interesting and entertaining.