The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[passerby]

Does it reset your categories? Please say no...

do people actually use those?

...what categories?

 

[J_C]

I guess they really did give up on hounding devs to update their game artwork. No worries, community will fix it.

Well they told everyone to update their artworks, otherwise Steam will create some deafult artwork. It's surprising that big name devs didn't do the updates.

 

[Belegarsson]

A lot of inconsistencies too, like the entire Total War franchise has proper artworks excluding Shogun 2, Wasteland 2 (original version) has director's cut artwork and DC entry doesn't have one, a Civ 4 expansion has artwork but the other xpacs plus base game have nothing.

 

[passerby]

It's still beta, most will update for the official release.

 

[Rahdulan]

SteamGridDB has started hosting vertical covers as well since yesterday.
https://www.steamgriddb.com/

 

[Fedora Master]

Utterly pointless crap that makes the Library tab worse in pretty much every way.

 

[LESS T_T]

I'm not that fond of the design, but new features like filters and collections are certainly welcome.

 

[Villagkouras]

Filters, collections and all that stuff could be useful, if the tag system was useful in the first place. At least they added drag & drop to collections.

 

[PrettyDeadman]

Is there a way to apply filters "WITHIN" a dynamic category, i.e. only apply it to titles you dropped in that category, and not every game you own?

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Doesn't look like it since you can't tag your games (I think). I create a collection with one game, select one random filter and other games show up. I think the filters are just to find games so you can put them into collections manually, not for searching inside collections?

I don't understand what the graphical representation of games you own on the right are for? You already have your easy to read list on the left? Just look messy as hell.

Just a default "all games" tab. You can collapse or delete it.

 

[passerby]

Filters, collections and all that stuff could be useful, if the tag system was useful in the first place. At least they added drag & drop to collections.

Tag system is useless, manually created categories/collections is the only way to go. You could already hold CTRL to mark multiple games and assign them category at once.
It took me 10min to make categories from the screenshot for a 500+ games library when I started loosing track of games I have. Each game is one click away without scrolling now.
Drag and drop is welcome, but it's just a very slightly more convenient way of adding a single new game to already defined collection, than rightclick and select category from the list.

Overall very minor changes, some unnecessary, some slightly for the better, I expected way worse, sigh of relief.
They should add an option to hide, or collapse to a tiny button sections from the store frontpage, like curators etc. fuck that crap.

 

[Dexter]

I'm starting to enjoy the "Shelves" functionality, you can "Add A New Shelf" based on your Pre-created categories, you can also Sort "All Games" or similar by "Last Played", "Hours Played", "Release Date" or similar:

Now if "Last Played" actually reflected "Last Played" and didn't also include "Last Bought" or "Last Key Redeemed" and if you could Drag & Drop the categories around...

 

[Alienman]

That is some huge icons.

 

[Sentinel]

This is the smallest it'll go

 

[Abu Antar]

People don't use categories?
I sort mine in 4:
-Beaten
-Unplayed
-Online
-Chill (mostly puzzle stuff) that are always installed
-Games I gave up on/never going to play

 

[Dexter]

This is the smallest it'll go

How do you make em smaller?

 

[Dexter]

You can use Store Tags for Dynamic Collections too btw. instead of Steams stupid "Genres", for instance "Point & Click":

You can also use Multiple Store Tags to make Dynamic Collections, for instance Search "RPG" first, then hit Enter and then Search for "Turn-Based":

Spoiler

 

[Sentinel]

This is the smallest it'll go

How do you make em smaller?

They added a Library entry to settings:

 

[Sentinel]

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamClientBeta/announcements/detail/1589131508764815822

Steam Client Beta - September 18, 2019
18 SEP @ 6:24PM - BOYD
The Steam Client Beta has been updated with the following changes:

New Library

• Cover art can now be zoomed in on under “Show more details”
  
• Events viewed from the library Home have an icon under the page buttons to take you to that game’s details page
  
• Add scrollbar to shelf dropdown for users with many collections
  
• Fixed alignment and layout issues around the play bar in various conditions
  
• Fixed some game demos not displaying in the library
  
• Fixed uninstall not being displayed in context menus for installed games when the user didn’t have a current license
  
• Fixed an issue where fullscreen Youtube videos failed to properly snap back to the library

General

• Fixed a beta client display regression in the activate cd key wizard
  
• Fixed find in page dialog on the store or community tabs displaying after navigating away from those tabs
  
• Fixed an occasional crash at launch when the user has a pending gift
  
• Enabled F5 key in store and community web views

SteamVR

• Fixed Steam crash on the second SteamVR startup in a session.

Big Picture

• Fixed a case where some games would not launch

 

[LESS T_T]

God, I hate the new developer/publisher links. Giving cool pages for companies is all good and well, but it complicates things when you're just looking for simple game list. And some publishers set developer links to redirect to their own page, in some case even if the developer is not their own. Jesus.

And look at Arkane Studio's list (that is inside of Bethesda's page). You've enjoyed Prey and Dishonored, and want to know about their other games? What? Where's Dark Messiah? Well of course, Bethesda does not own that. You have no right to know about it.

Finally, Augmented Steam added search page links beside dev/pub page links. I hate some publishers redirect developer links to their own publisher pages.

 

[Dexter]

Some things that they could do is make the Categories Drag&Droppable instead of Alphabetical with "Favorites" always on Top. They already have a Drag&Drop feature implemented where you can drag games from the right into a Collection on the left (or to remove them from it) and it seems to work fine, but the Collections themselves seem to be fixed.

Also a "Sort By" Steam reviews would be more useful than "Metacritic Score", because who honestly cares about the "Metacritic Score"?

 

[LESS T_T]

More Steam Labs. Deep Dive; community review-based recommendation stream; and the Recommender is now integrated into the main page: https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1599264607923965569

Steam Labs Update
Explore new ways to discover games you’ll love in Steam Labs


Experiment 005: Deep Dive

We’ve worked with indie game developer Lars Doucet of Level Up Labs to bring his novel Diving Bell prototype to Steam Labs in the form of the Deep Dive experiment, where it now directly leverages Steam APIs to serve up recommendations and related game information. The new experiment offers an exploratory interface to discover new games based on their similarity to familiar ones, plus the ability to use these recommendations themselves as jumping-off points to dive even deeper into what Steam has to offer.



Deep Dive leverages tags provided by each game’s creators and the Steam Community of users to identify games similar to the ones you know and love. In the interest of helping users explore a breadth of games, Deep Dive displays very similar, somewhat similar, and little-known but well-loved similar games among each set of recommendations it displays. Explore Steam’s popular new releases as a jumping off point, or log in to begin exploration from one of your own recently played games. How many degrees of separation do you find between No Thing and Everything? We count six, which checks out with Bacon’s Law.

Deep Dive’s variation from the original prototype is based on some things we learned by playtesting during development. For example, tags the base game shares in common with each recommendation are more prominently displayed to help inform both what the game is about and why it was recommended.

We’ve tried to strike the right balance between providing relevant details without overwhelming users in the process of browsing and we hope you’ll let us know what you think. We can’t help but add a few items to our own wishlists each time we test Deep Dive. (Well hello, Circa Infinity!) We suspect this is a good sign of its potential, and we’d love your thoughts on whether Deep Dive offers a compelling alternative to other forms of content discovery.

Experiment 006: Community Reviews

Your Steam Friends list and activity feeds are great ways to see what games your buddies are currently enjoying, but what about the rest of the Steam Community? Top sellers are one way to keep your finger on the pulse, but positive reviews can be an even stronger signal of what the Community is enjoying on Steam. With this in mind, our Community Reviews experiment surfaces the games people are actively recommending to one another on Steam.



The Community Reviews experiment provides a great overview of what’s hot on Steam, listing today’s recommendations sorted by their helpfulness to readers. Advanced controls enable users to expand the view to include this week’s, or this month’s reviews, or to limit the set to reviews written after a particular duration of playtime. For a more specific take on the Talk, users can filter the view to include or exclude particular tags. For example, check out the punishing Perma Death games people claim to be enjoying today, or catch up on the Story-rich RPGs people are getting lost in this week, or browse through the Online Co-op games players are enjoying together this month.

Update - Experiment 002: The Interactive Recommender

The Interactive Recommender doesn’t need you to interact with it before proving itself useful, so we’ve given it a chance to earn its keep right on the Steam Store home page. Simply log into the Steam store and you’ll see games our machine learning server has lovingly featured just for you based on your recent gameplay. Plus, click through to Steam Labs where you can explore titles new or old, popular or niche, with the machine’s bespoke take on your tastes, informed by thousands of other players... a lot like you.



As always, we hope you’ll check out these latest and upcoming additions to Steam Labs and let us know what you think in the discussions. Your feedback shapes our experimentation and informs the ideas which become a part Steam for keeps.

 

[Curratum]

If Valve doesn't come up with some way to allow you to hide the "recent news" and "recently played" bands from the library home view, I'm switching to the GOG Galaxy 2.0 client.

 

[Country_Gravy]

Does it work on a tablet?

 

[LESS T_T]

Made some cover art for fun: