Namely, Valve has had the latest batch of upgrades for Steam available as part of its experimental “Labs” feature, where users could test some of them out in a relatively controlled environment. Now, however, all Steam users have immediate access to a substantial list of discoverability and ease-of-use improvements, such as the addition of genre hubs, concise game summaries, powerful sorting tools and filters, and more.

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Valve has focused on deeply personalized recommendations and highlights this time around, and Steam should now be able to more correctly curate the sort of content that a user might be interested in. For example, whenever one interacts with a Steam hub of any sort, said hub will deliver recommendations based on their gaming track record. This tracks with some of Valve’s other ongoing projects, specifically the custom Steam Year in Review page that may be coming towards the end of 2022.

Valve seems to be having a bit of a Steam renaissance in 2022, by the looks of it. Not only has the company just delivered the aforementioned suite of upgrades for its core gaming client, but it’s also working on improvements to the Steam mobile app. Odds are that a visual revamp of the store might be in order down the line, too, as its gaming-focused Big Picture mode is due to receive a new UI that’s similar to that of the Steam Deck or SteamOS in general.

In regard to quality-of-life improvements, however, Steam still has a long way to go with some of its more specialized features. Namely, Valve recently had to ban Steam Curator accounts for scamming developers out of game keys, which has proven to be an especially egregious can of worms. Even though the Curators in question got banned, it’s likely that this merely scratched the surface of the system, which seems to be ripe for similar cases of abuse.

While Steam is the company’s most notable project by far, Valve has multiple games in development too, according to one of its product designers. Whether any of them end up materializing on Steam anytime soon is a difficult question to answer, but it seems likely that upgrades such as the ones featured in this article will be simpler and faster to execute than an all-new Half-Life game would be, for example.

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Source: Steam