Valve is Overhauling the Steam Library

Say goodbye to the old Steam library page. Valve has announced it's going to renovate the way you organize, sort, and sift through all the games in your Steam collection, as part of a broader push on the PC gaming storefront.

Launching in open beta on September 17, the new Steam library will organize games in a more visual way and incorporate updates into the mix. A "What's New" tab will show which of your games have received recent updates, and algorithms will help sort out the feed, so a game with frequent updates (Dota Underlords, for example) won't dominate the cycle.

Developers will also be able to use the "Events" function to broadcast in-game events or tournaments, as well as share info about updates or announcements with players of any given game. Those tools should be rolling out today, and will be accessible in both the new library and on Steam store pages.

Collections will let you drag and drop games into sorted categories. If you have a select set of games you like to pull up on your TV for some couch co-op or lighthearted party fun, for example, you could make a folder for that in your Steam library. You can also filter by tags, genre, number of players, or other criteria to better find what you're looking for.

This is part of Valve's larger rollout to update the Steam platform, including the recent Steam Labs features like Micro Trailers and the Interactive Recommender. New updates are also dropping for those tools, increasing their capabilities and expanding across broader swathes of the Steam ecosystem.

If this is the end result of the ongoing feud between Steam and rival PC platform Epic, it's one of the better outcomes that could have happened. Steam's presence on computers was, and arguably still is, monolithic, and most folks who own some kind of gaming-focused computer probably have a massive backlog of Steam games. Better tools for sorting, organizing, and keeping up with all those games is never a bad thing.

Thanks, Games Industry Biz.