Does Steam look different to you today—girthier, perhaps? If so, and you’re a Steam client beta participant, you’ll be happy to know that you’re not imagining it, nor do your eyeglasses need adjustment. Steam has embiggened its store pages, taking them from 940 pixels wide to 1200, a change it said is part of an ongoing effort “to modernize the design and provide a better experience for players with larger monitors.”
“This improves the shopping experience in a number of ways, allowing for bigger screenshots and trailers, and allowing more room to describe your features in the written description area,” Valve said of the change. “Of course the page will still scale down appropriately for smaller screens or smaller browser windows.”
Previous steps in the ‘modernization’ process of Steam include new storefront navigation, Valve said, as well as the razzle-dazzle new video player that rolled out at the end of July. The thickification process “includes refreshing the page layouts to make better use of modern screen sizes and resolutions, as well as optimizing page loads for display on mobile and handheld devices.”
The difference isn’t immediately obvious, but side by side, yeah, there’s no mistaking it. Here’s the Mr. Rabbit Magic Show store page in the live version of the Steam client:
And this is what it looks like in the beta build—not a tremendous difference, but overall I think it’s a better use of available real estate.
Steam’s front page has changed as well: It’s not wider, like the store pages, but the left-hand column has been combined with the top menu bar “into one cohesive menu, bringing all your essential links into a more unified and reorganized space.”
This actually happened at the end of July, and honestly I’m less convinced by it: Your mileage may vary, but I like having links on pages so I can just click what I want without having to dig through an avalanche of dropdowns.
This is the old:
And this is the new.
If you dig Steam’s new look, you can have it for yourself by going into your Steam settings (in the client, not the web page), selecting Interface, and then choosing “Steam Beta Update” in the Client Beta Participation dropdown. Wait for the update to download and install, and you’re off to the races. If you’d rather not horse around with the beta, that’s cool too: Valve said that if everything goes smoothly, this beta may only run for a few weeks before it’s rolled out to everyone.
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