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Tag: Steam Redesign

  • Steam Greenlight Launches Today: Let the Voting Begin

    Valve, the creators of Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress 2, and the popular Steam digital video game distribution platform, announced today that Steam Greenlight has officially launched. The voting has already begun.

    Greenlight is a new system that allows gamers to vote on what new games should be sold in the Steam Store. Developers can post screenshots, descriptions, and videos detailing their game in an effort to impress gamers and garner votes. As of right now, a quick count shows that there are already over 250 game projects to be voted on, and more are being added constantly. Some of the more interesting titles I’ve already glimpsed in Greenlight include Kenshi, Dawn of Fantasy, and Slender: Source.

    “We’ve been working on this feature for the last few months with the input from a group of indie partners, and the response has been extremely positive,” said Anna Sweet, business development at Valve. “With the additional help of beta testers, we are able to launch with a solid line-up of titles for the community to start viewing and rating. And, as we’ve done with all Steam features, we intend to continually grow and modify Greenlight as more and more developers and community members have a chance to get involved.”

    Perhaps Steam Greenlight is simply part of Valve’s redesign of Steam to focus more on user-generated content. Or, perhaps Steam Greenlight is the result of Valve being inundated with more indie game submissions than they had the manpower to keep up with. Either way, PC gamers now have a ton of control over what gets into the Steam store, and indie developers will have to keep that in mind when designing games.

  • Steam Announces a Pinterest-Like “Game Hub” Overhaul

    In the past decade, Steam has gone from being annoying digital rights management (DRM) software for Valve games to one of the most celebrated gaming distribution platforms of modern gaming. Physical copies of PC games have all but disappeared from retail game stores, due in part to the popularity of Steam and the other digital distribution platforms it inspired.

    Today, Valve announced that it will soon be updating the Steam Community to focus more on user-created content and community discussion. The announcement page on steamcommunity.com makes it clear that all of the features of the new Steam will be revealed over the next three days. From the announcement:

    Dear Steam Community,
    Since we launched Steam Screenshots in February 2011, players have taken over 80 million screenshots chronicling their adventures, conquests, battles, victories, and defeats. Since May 2011, almost 1 million videos were shared by linking your YouTube and Steam accounts. And since the introduction of the Steam Workshop in September, you’ve created over 200,000 Workshop items…So we’re working on a Community update focused on finding and sharing the best of that content.

    Today’s announcement is about how each game’s page will look in Steam. The redesign will center each video game in its own “Hub” where all of the content surrounding that game is aggregated. As seen in the screenshot above, each “Hub” will have specific tabs for discussion, screenshots, videos, the Steam Workshop, and news. The “All” tab will sort all of this content into a Pinterest-like interface that can be seen in the larger screenshot below. Players will be able to leave comments on posts and give a thumbs-up to content that they enjoy or approve of, meaning the community will curate content to some extent.

    Steam

    A new set of features will be showcased tomorrow, but Valve has not given any hint as to what those features are. The company did state, though, that a closed beta for the redesigned Steam is coming, and will be announced soon.