Steam Library redesign makes it more of a personal hub
The beta, which adds collections and provides a more cohesive view of your games, activity and community content, launches on Sept. 17.
Steam's bringing its Library design into the 21st century with a new Collections feature and more thumbnail-intensive, appealing view of your games and activity. You'll be able to try it out starting Sept. 17 when it goes into open beta. Plus, its Steam Labs Micro Trailers experiment -- an autogenerated playlist of 6-second trailers that you can browse by tag -- becomes a real feature starting Thursday, Sept. 5.
Replacing it in the Labs on Thursday will be a slightly enhanced search page with price filters and the ability to narrow by your preferences; in the future, it will add Deep Dive, a browsing design that infinitely serves up similar games so you can sink into a time-sucking abyss of "discoverability." It's based on Lars Doucet's "Diving Bell" concept.
Valve is also revamping Steam's events information display to provide a unified view of events, updates and announcements, as well as giving developers and streamers tools to make events more eventful.
You'll be able to customize what appears on your Library home page.
In some ways the redesign reminds me of Gog's Galaxy 2 beta; like Galaxy, Steam adds the metaphor of "shelves," and the new version also aims to consolidate information into more scannable chunks. I love the idea of Collections, especially the autoupdating-based-on-tags Dynamic Collections, though I'd really like to be able to filter by different features -- for instance, Steam Cloud support is a big one, as are special features like HDR or DXR support and system requirements (can it run on a potato?), though the latter probably isn't a big need for a lot of people.
Even if you're not a big user of the advanced features in the Library, it's definitely a lot more appealing to look at and will reduce the jumping around you currently have to do.
