Valve pushes forward ever forward with its massive overhaul of the Steam platform, announcing this week a slew of updates and a new Steam Labs experiment in the works.
Micro Trailers and a Revamped Search Function
First and foremost, Valve is porting the Micro Trailer test over to the entire Steam library after a limited 15-category trial period. Users can now access a six-second amalgamated clip of trailers to get a feel for each title.
The idea is to give a condensed look at what the game is all about to help with the decision-making process. Moreover, users can now explore Micro Trailers through a categorization system of close to 400 different tags ranging from genres to more granular features like, for example, vehicles.
The update also launches a new search function that should ease hunting down for the next title to waste away your free time.
The new search eases narrowing down relevant search results through a bevy of new filters. These include tags, price, discounted games, and even the ability to remove already-owned titles from search results for a more streamlined results page that now has an infinite scroll feature, getting ride of the platform’s notoriously tedious page-hopping drag.
Steam Introduces Deep Dive to Make Your Game Backlog Even Larger
Finally, Steam has unveiled the next experiment to hit the platform – Deep Dive. The company says:
“The new experiment will offer an exploratory interface to discover new games based on their similarity to familiar ones, plus the ability to use these recommendations themselves as a jumping-off point to dive even deeper into what Steam has to offer.”
In other words, trawling through Steam’s catalog should be a significantly more enjoyable experience.
Although Steam is desperately in need of a facelift, having changed very little over the years, the risk is that it will be a lot easier to track down games that pique our interest resulting in an even more extensive backlog of games we’ll probably never play.
Whether the changes carry over to the Chinese version of Steam remains to be seen.