Last week Andy reported on some slides that had emerged from a Valve presentation at games convention Indigo 2017. The slides indicated that a major overhaul was due for the Steam client, including a user interface upgrade and improved discoverability. The full video has emerged on YouTube, and while the slides pretty much say it all, there are some interesting tidbits within.
Among these is that Valve intends to increase store personalization, which involves completely rewriting their "automatic recommender engine". This will, by the sound of things, put more focus on Curator's recommendations, the type of games the user already plays, and the games a user's friends enjoy.
The Curator system is getting a bit more love in other ways, too. For developers, they'll soon be able to send games to verified Curators within Steam, eradicating the need for Steam keys. This is preferable because indie devs are often defrauded of keys by people masquerading as games journalists, but it also means rogue activation keys won't be resold.
Elsewhere, there's to be a new Library home screen which will somewhat mirror the experience of Big Picture's equivalent. For those who want to jump straight into the last game they played, it will be easier, but the screen will also display recently updated games in the user's library, new games currently popular among friends, and related events (double XP weekends, etcetera).
Overall, the changes just sound like iterations, and without some images of the UI itself it's hard to sense how sweeping the update will be. Valve's Aiden Kroll said the company had decided against showing work-in-progress images because anything could change between now and deployment. So I guess in the meantime, we wait.
Here's the full video:
