The Steam platforms library was frankly abysmal for the longest time; random news segments littered everyone’s library for the title selected, no matter the actual relation to the game you’ve selected. Searching through libraries for what you wanted to play, or what had been recently updated, was a headache of monumental proportions. All of that finally changes now, with Steam’s newest library feature officially leaving beta access to come mainstream.
Of first important note is that our game collections now look beautiful; gorgeous box-art is displayed prominently in the library, with each game auto-generating the image via the Steam store. From The Long Dark to Sekiro, our libraries are now more attractively and immersive upon the first boot-up of the new update.
The new Steam Library features are now available to everyone!https://t.co/2xZ1w8xMNm
— Steam (@Steam) October 30, 2019
Additionally, recently updated games prominently appear in the top of your library, allowing you to note at a glance which games have updated recently, allowing to ensure you don’t miss any seasonal events happening in your favorite games. This also brings us to the new ‘Events’ segment; Steam walked a precarious line between bombarding users with endless notifications of games that have already been shelved, to ensuring all players interested in said events have a chance to participate in them.
Developers now have access to a brand-spanking-new event creator that allows developers to communicate these limited-time events directly to their consumers. It also allows developers to highlight fan-art, live-streams, and community challenges.
I’d lobby for prudence on behalf of the developers on this; not many users would want to look at their games and be visually accosted with numerous events that hold zero significance.
Games are organized within shelves on the Steam library, with each shelf prominently displaying player-chosen categories of games, along with their recently-played. An interesting segment that hasn’t been found is one that is displayed in Steam’s ‘Big Picture Mode’; a category that highlights games you have never tried, haven’t beaten, or haven’t played in a while. You can even sort your games automatically on a shelf by Metacritic score, hours played, or the game your friends are most likely to boot up when they finally get online.
On the top of the left-most game list (that hasn’t changed much), users can also find a drop-down menu that allows them to select various applications, from games to software, and everything in between.
It remains to be seen whether this change will affect large PC gaming websites such as RockPaperShotgun and PC Gamer, as merely mentioning a title in one of their posts would cause the article to show in the Steam library. Clearly, this was an option elected due to the fact that it can be automated with WordPress to keep Steam’s library replete with relevant news, yet for older or more esoteric titles, it often ended up adding large amounts of news-spam that had nothing to do with the selected game. While it’s clear that the primary stream of clicks to these websites was not from the Steam library itself, they absolutely added to their overall traffic.
All in all, this is a fantastic update that will allow users to breathe a much-needed sigh of relief. Steam game collections are becoming more storied by the moment, and having proper tools to manage and mitigate the tsunami of titles ensure that users can explore their titles.
