Steam’s had an overhaul. The world’s biggest PC gaming storefront has had a tidy-up, making it appear much less cluttered and busy when you browse.
Central to the overhaul is a new search and navigation bar, which absorbs all of the messy navigation which used to sprawl down the left-hand side of Steam’s homepage, and relocates it to a horizontal nav-bar across the top. An enlarged and improved search bar sits like a prize goose in the middle of this.
This deeply alluring (and more easily identifiable) search bar now displays more things, such as popular searches, recent searches, and your most popular genres when you click on it. And it allows you to search by things like publisher, category and tag, which you couldn’t do before. There’s an Advanced Search option where you can specify searches further, too.
Next to the search bar there’s a new Wishlist category, which shows how many games you currently have wishlisted (34, if you’re wondering) and takes you to your Wishlist. The other options on the nav-bar condense everything else, across Browse, Recommendations, Categories, Hardware, Ways to Play, and More drop-down menus.
Generally, a lot of thought has been put into how to surface more games you might like, without Steam looking like a frantic jumble sale. The new horizontal nav-bar also follows you around wherever you are on Steam, which eradicates the issue where you’d be on a page somewhere, like a seasonal sale page, and the left-hand navigation would disappear. There’s more explanation of Valve’s thinking in a Steam Store redesign update blog. These changes have been tested in beta for a while, incidentally, so any kinks ought to have been ironed out.
