Steam is finally getting an overhaul to its library.
Let’s be honest: Steam’s library sucks. Sure, you get to see some important info, like your list of games and how long you’ve played those games, along with important updates in a strictly text-based headline, but that’s about it. It’s plain, it’s boring, and generally people don’t even look at it when they’ve got a perfectly good game icon already sitting on their desktop.
It’s been this way for years, but it looks like Valve has finally taken note of how boring the Steam library page truly is. A brand new Steam beta was just announced yesterday that will overhaul the library page from top to bottom, making it more modern, more streamlined, and above all, more beautiful.
First, the library will get a brand new landing page. No longer will it default to whatever game you've been playing last--instead, you get a page that showcases your entire library at a glance.
At the top is a new section that notifies the user of what games have recently been updated, which might even convince them to re-install an older game and take it for a spin. Below that are your recently played games, making it easier to launch back into whatever games you've got on the go. Friends activity comes next so you can see what your friends are playing, and below that, your collections are shown based on whichever preferred list you'd want to display first.
On the left-hand side is the same list of every game you own, but now it's there as an afterthought and not the main event.
Click on any given game and you'll be taken to that specific game's landing page which will showcase the most recent updates first and a brief snippet about what that update did. Below that, community activity shows if there have been any recently updated mods, guides, or fan art.
Finally, the Events tab will showcase limited-time events that might be taking place in a game you own. Valve says they'll create this tab "without bombarding you with notifications," but they don't say how exactly they'll go about doing that.
For gamers that have a lot of ongoing current titles, like CS:GO, Warframe, and Dota2, we can easily see the events page becoming a problem as each of these titles will have at least one event going on at any given time. Perhaps there will be some way to customize Steam's notifications, but we don't know how that'll work yet.
But we'll find out on September 17th. That's when the open beta begins and people can start playing around with the new features. Developers can start tinkering with them as of today to get a head start. We’ll be sure to learn more in the coming weeks.
Source: Steam