New Steam UI Hitting Gamers on Monday, April 26
News
By
Marcus Yam
Published
Steam to show off its new look next week.
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Steam will have a brand new look come Monday, April 26. The new Steam UI has been in beta since late February, but it'll be launched next week because: a) it's time for a new design, and b) the new rendering engine works for non-Windows platforms.
"We made hundreds of changes to the Steam client as a result of customer feedback on the interface, performance, and functionality," said John Cook, Director of Steam Development at Valve.
"We swapped out the Internet Explorer rendering engine with WebKit, which gives us a bunch of size, stability and performance benefits," explained Cook. "This release of Steam leaves us well prepared for another year of strong growth."
Major features:
- Complete overhaul of Steam client UI design to improve discoverability of features and to better expose all the information related to games in your library
- Complete overhaul of in-game overlay UI design to create a richer in-game experience exposing context sensitive information related to the game you are currently playing
- New game details view, presenting a detailed view of all the information for a single game in your library
- New grid view, presenting a graphical view of your game library
- New news page in the store/client/overlay which aggregates from Valve related news sites, official community groups, and third-party gaming news feeds
- New downloads view in the client, making it easier to track your progress downloading new games or game updates
- New Steam store design, including more integrated community features, improved recommendations, and improved video and screenshots viewing (and much more!)
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TOPICS
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
28 Comments
Comment from the forums
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Morgan3rd I've been using the beta for a while. No doubt it is easier on the eyes than regular steam. To be honest, my favorite update about it is the addition of a clock for the in game overlay.Reply -
silversurfernhs Finally, the last reason to have IE is gone! I can finally uninstall IE without conflicting with any programs that need it.Reply -
yang i hate how steam displays how long you've spent playing games in total and in the past 2 weeks. Some of us like to keep the nerd in us private. Hope they gives us the option to make it private infoReply -
Aionism I've been using the beta for a few weeks. The improved in-game web browser is the best part.Reply -
Kelavarus I've been using the Beta, but it's still got a ridiculous amount of issues, I'm surprised it's being released...Reply
And yes, the clock is awesome. Even if I ignore it and keep gaming anyway. -
zerapio Morgan3rdTo be honest, my favorite update about it is the addition of a clock for the in game overlay.Wow, that's really nice. (y)Reply
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jsschneidereit yangi hate how steam displays how long you've spent playing games in total and in the past 2 weeks. Some of us like to keep the nerd in us private. Hope they gives us the option to make it private infohaha my girlfriend came over the other night and was shocked that I had spent a total of 50+/- hours on Bad Company 2 over the entire time it's been out haha and I was like that's like an hour a night! it's not even bad!Reply -
yang jsschneidereithaha my girlfriend came over the other night and was shocked that I had spent a total of 50+/- hours on Bad Company 2 over the entire time it's been out haha and I was like that's like an hour a night! it's not even bad!haha EXACTLY! and 50 hours shows extreme self control for BFBC2 which is an epic of a game.Reply -
bucherm yangi hate how steam displays how long you've spent playing games in total and in the past 2 weeks. Some of us like to keep the nerd in us private. Hope they gives us the option to make it private infoReply
If you're ashamed of it, then you should probably stop playing as much man.