Steam's storefront has been looking a little samey since it received the "Discovery" facelift in 2014. Valve apparently agrees, as the company sent out an announcement this weekend to Steamworks developers advising them of upcoming changes to the storefront. That announcement is only visible to registered Steamworks developers, but the full text of the announcement is already up thanks to NeoGAF forums member Nzyme32.
None of the changes appear to be huge, at least based on how Valve describes them. Valve will be cleaning up some visual clutter on the Steam homepage and using larger game images in some places. A few improved navigation options will fill up the left side of the page, including links to personalized content like curator-suggested games and the user's own discovery queue. A "Popular Among Friends" section will let gamers to see what titles their friends have been playing that they don't yet own.
The updates seem to be focused on helping smaller developers find an audience for their games. Right now, Valve simply guarantees developers a certain number of views in the randomly-selected New Relases and Newly Updated sections. After the updates, both sections will be showing targeted choices based on users' game preferences. Valve says that even though developers may ultimately get less views as a result, the views they receive should be more valuable.
Along those lines, users will get an option to configure "Global Customer Preferences." In essence, users will be able to filter content they aren't interested in via broad categories such as Early Access, Software, Videos, or VR. Valve doesn't say whether users will be able to apply the global filters to user-supplied tags, as the current Discovery queue allows, so we've reached out for clarification. The company says the update will be rolling out "in a few weeks."
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Zak Killian
Former Tech Contributor
