Today, Valve announced the rollout of an update to the Steam store that adds a handful of long-requested features to improve navigation.
Firstly, the auto-suggestion drop-down menu will now let users search directly for tags, developers, and publishers, provided that the latter two have set up their own pages on Steam. The search function will also now return suitable results for specific game franchises and even for game categories, including ‘early access’, for instance. These relatively straightforward updates should enable much simpler navigation of Steam, which could be almost daunting nowadays given the number of games and applications featured in the store.
The search functionality was also made smarter if the user typed an inaccurate word, as shown in the image below. By the way, all of these improvements are also available via the Steam Mobile application or even via the Steam website when browsed through mobile devices.
Earlier this week, the team at Valve also unveiled improvements to the display logic and trailer categories on the Steam product pages.
A maximum of two trailers can now be displayed before the screenshots. Any other trailers submitted by the developer will be moved after the screenshots to guarantee that Steam users always view a mix of screenshots and trailers.
As such, it now falls upon developers to pick an order in which they want their trailers displayed. In the backend, it’s also possible to specify country or language restrictions per video. If there are none, the top two listed trailers will be displayed first on the Steam page, with any others moved to be displayed after all of the submitted images.
Moreover, developers may now choose from a predefined list of categories for trailers. Available categories include:
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General / Cinematic
– Most trailers fall into this category; these typically show a mix of pre-rendered video, logos, title screens, accolades, and maybe some limited gameplay.
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Teaser
– A short video, often posted when a game is first announced, often doesn’t show much of the game but teases the title, IP, or franchise.
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Gameplay
– When a trailer is mostly comprised of gameplay, showing the user what it’s like to play the game and from the perspective that the player will be playing.
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Interview / Dev Diary
– Non-fiction interview or documentary video.
Now, if only Valve would improve the actual Steam video player to support modern features such as resolution selection, playback speed selection, and captions selection, I’d be grateful. It’ll have to wait for another Steam update, I guess.
