Steam Store Set For UI Revamp, Includes New Curator Options; Releases ‘In A Few Weeks’

The Steam Store is about to get some major user interface overhauls from Valve, with overall intent behind the changes being for the store to be able to offer a much more refined way for users to manage their own experiences as well as to better provide information for others with regards to certain games.

Valve took some time over the weekend to inform its SteamWorks developers that the Steam Store is getting some new changes to its user interface. The Steam Store changes were listed down in a post on the SteamWorks developers group, but non-members are not able to peek into the details of the post due to the group being private.

To share the information with the rest of the Steam Store users, NeoGAF user Nzym32 took the information and posted them on the community website, as reported by Kotaku. The post began by remarking on the idea of the Steam Store being "built around personalization and recommendations," and so Valve will be instituting some changes to further refine the Steam store to better embody that idea.

Some of the first few in the list of changes are more basic, but will be readily apparent since they affect the immediate Steam store page: The update will change the store's face by allowing bigger game images and cleaning it up overall, while another change is also coming to the left navigational column of the store that will offer more categories as well as a more streamlined ability to set preferences.

Other Steam Store updates were more targeted to SteamWorks developers, giving them more opportunities to promote their games. The way for newly released games to appear on the Steam store will be tweaked and the Steam store's method of handling how a game targets prospective buyers will also be changed.

Most notably, the Steam Store will also be getting a new set of curator options. As a common way to provide information for the game is to use the Steam Curator feature, which was originally intended solely as a rating system for games, the update will now allow users to do so separately without influencing the game's rating; meaning that a game's rating will be somewhat more accurate while at the same time the additional information will be much easier to access.

No other news was provided about the Steam Store update, like if the updates will all happen at once or bit by bit. However, it was stated that Valves plans to implement the changes soon and they will "roll out the update in a few weeks."