Steam Discovery Update

Steam Home > The Discovery Update

A smarter storefront,

Personalized just for you

Discover your next favorite game. The Steam Discovery Update makes it easier to find exactly what you want when shopping for a new game experience.

In the past nine months, over 1,300 new titles have been added to Steam. We know you can’t play them all, so we’ve updated Steam with new features and functionality to help you discover the best new releases, the classics, and the unique indie gems you might be interested in.

Below you will find more detailed information on all the new ways to explore what’s on Steam and the changes we’ve made. Give it a try, tweak your settings, and – as always – send us your feedback so we can continue to make the experience even better.

Your Home Page

The Steam Discovery Update starts with the new, smarter Home page, which introduces a variety of ways for you to explore the over 3,700 titles now available on Steam.

Specifically, the new features at your disposal from the Home page include personalized recommendations based on your gameplay, reviews from your favorite community Curators, and powerful new search and discovery tools.

To further personalize your Steam shopping experience, many areas are customizable and automatically filter out the products that you have already bought and the titles you have indicated you aren't interested in.

See your Steam Home Page

Discover new favorites

Right on your Home page, you’ll find a greater variety of games. From popular new releases and top sellers, to recommendations and suggestions by friends, there are many ways to discover the next game to play.

Customize your view

New configuration options let you select the kind of products you wish to include in each area. We’ve started with some defaults that we think make sense for most users, but feel free to customize it to your own tastes.

Your Discovery Queue

Your Steam Discovery Queue is a powerful, new way of exploring the most popular new releases that you haven’t yet seen. You can quickly browse through games that are suggested for you, and you can choose to follow the game, add it to your Wishlist, purchase it, or indicate that you are not interested. Your Discovery Queue is automatically refreshed each day with new, top-selling releases.

Learn more about your Queue

Wishlist, Follow, or Ignore

For any product in Steam, including those in your Discovery Queue, you can easily add it to your Wishlist, follow the game’s announcements in your activity feed, or mark it as ignored to exclude it from future recommendations and featured spots.

Or just skip to the next game

No matter what action you take on a game (or even if you don’t take one), you can always quickly skip to the next item in your queue to easily explore through the Steam catalog.

Steam Curators

Steam Curators are individuals, organizations, and groups that publish reviews and recommendations in a public forum on Steam.

Following a few Steam Curators is another way to discover and learn about new products. Their picks show up on your home page as well as in your community activity feed, where you can comment and rate those recommendations.

Become a taste maker yourself. Are you an expert in what makes a really good 2D Platformer? Or, maybe you’re really in to Survival Horror games and want to help others find the best. It’s easy with Steam Curators. Anyone can be a Steam Curator by simply making some recommendations via a Steam Community Group.

Learn more about Curators

Powerful Search and Filtering

Whether you are searching for something specific, or just want to browse the Steam catalog, the updated Steam Search is more powerful than ever. The search auto complete can usually find and suggest the title you are looking for within a few keystrokes, while the search results page adds powerful new filtering controls for narrowing down your results.

Search by name, tag, or description

You can always search for specific products by typing the title. But you can also enter tags or terms to search for particular themes, genres, or content. Now you can easily search for your favorite Twin Stick Shooters, Rogue-likes, or games featuring Vampires.

Filter by tags and features

Once you’ve searched for a term, title, or tag, you can further narrow your results with new filters. Narrow your search by tags, Steam features, operating system, and language. Now you can search for that Co-Op Dungeon Crawler with Steam Trading Cards you’ve been looking for.

Recommendation Feed

The Steam Recommendation Feed is a nearly endless list of recommendations designed to showcase the broad variety of titles available on Steam. Like the other recommendations throughout Steam, the feed will recommend to you titles based on the games you’ve been playing and what your friends are enjoying. But it also features well-reviewed titles that you may be interested in from categories across Steam.

The Recommendation Feed helps to make sure you don’t miss that interesting indie title that’s unlike anything you’ve played so far, or that awesome adventure game that you missed from last year. Just keep scrolling down on the home page to load more recommendations.

As you browse this list of titles, you can easily add to your Wishlist, or you can select the title to learn more about it. If you see a title you are not interested in, just click the ‘Ignore’ button and Steam won’t show that item to you in the future.

Start Exploring Now

Check out your personalized Steam Home page to see Recommendations, Steam Curators, your Discovery Queue, popular new releases, reviews by friends, and much, much more. Click below to visit www.steampowered.com and get started exploring.

See your Steam Home Page

Discovery Update Changelist Sept 22nd, 2014

General

Changed ‘New Releases’ to ‘Popular New Releases’ to filter out less popular titles and provide a more functional release list.
Adding colored indicators wherever titles are listed that show the item is in your library, on your wishlist, or in your cart.
Updating the main ‘Games’ drop-down menu to link to tag pages for most popular genres. Browsing genres pages through these links now come with the benefit of the powerful filtering controls on the right-hand side of each tag page.
Adding a main ‘Software’ drop-down menu for quicker browsing to specific software genres.
Updated the visual design, layout and typography of the store to reflect a more contemporary Steam brand direction (also commonly referred to as “Making the store blue”).
Removed the ‘Recommended for you’ page. This page has been replaced by the entire home page of Steam.
Most areas of the store now default to showing you games only for the operating system you are currently browsing from. This can be overridden by changing the ‘Customize’ options in many sections or by removing the OS filter (for search results and genre pages).

Home Page

Updated with new visual styles.
Main capsule now includes recommendations based on games you’ve been playing.
Main capsule by default excludes titles that are already on your account. This setting can be changed by clicking the ‘customize’ button.
Main capsule added a ‘Customize’ button which lets you toggle showing Top Sellers, Early Access, Games you’ve already bought, Recommended for you, Pre-purchase, Software, DLC.
‘New on Steam’ section now offers a ‘Customize’ button which lets you toggle showing Early Access, Games you’ve already bought, and Software.
‘Recently Updated’ section now offers a ‘Customize’ button which lets you toggle showing Early Access, Games you’ve already bought, and Software.
Added a new ‘Recommended For You’ section to the right-hand side to highlight games that Steam recommends for you based on what your friends recommend, what's on your wishlist, or similar to games you have recently played.
Added Discovery Queue entry point (see below for details on Discovery Queue).
Added Steam Curators entry point (see below for details on Steam Curators).
Added a Recommendation Feed to the bottom of the home page. As you scroll down the page, this section shows you products recommended based on what you've recently played, what your friends recommend, what's on your wishlist, and well-reviewed titles from categories across Steam.

Added New Discovery Queue Feature

A queue of 12 titles personalized for each user, which includes recommended titles, new titles, and popular releases.
Added an entry point for the Discovery Queue on your home page, which takes you to the first title in your queue.
Each user has controls to customize their queue by toggling the inclusion of Early Access, Unreleased, or OS specific titles.
Added a link to queue from ‘for you’ drop-down menu.

Added New Steam Curators Feature

Added a display of popular curators to follow on your home page (Recommended curators will appear once there are enough popular curators in the system).
Once you follow one or more curator, the Steam Curator space on the Steam home page will show you specific titles recommended by curators you follow.
Added a link to Steam Curators from ‘for you’ drop-down menu.
Added a page where you can find all the products recommended by curators you follow, sorted by titles that are recommended by the most number of curators at the top.
On each product page, added a display of popular curators that recommend that title. If you follow any curators that recommend that title, those curators will be listed first.

Product Pages

Updated with new visual styles.
Added queue controls to each page so you can quickly jump to learning about another product.
Added a ‘Not Interested’ button to each product page so you can indicate which products you don’t wish to see recommended or featured to you.
Percentage of positive and negative reviews for each product is now summarized at the top of each product page.
Changed “Join Official Group” to “Follow” for games to more accurately describe the benefit of creating a relationship with that game. Following a game means you will see announcements from that game in your community activity feed.
Changed the order of features in the right-hand column to remove redundancies and prioritize friend activity.
For titles that are in your library, the page now move all the relevant information to be together in one place, so you can see the game is already in your library, launch the game, see how much you’ve played, and write a review.
DRM is more clearly called out in right-hand column.
Added links to view any 3rd-party EULAs required by the product.
Added a screenshot viewer for quickly viewing high resolution screenshots.
DLC lists on product pages now indicate which items are already in your library, on your wishlist, or in your cart.
Updated the product page background images to have different masking and coloring applied to match new visual styles.
Written description and special announcement areas are now default to being collapsed to make it easier to scan down the page and find reviews. You can expand each section to read more if you wish.
System requirements for titles with multiple OS support will now display a set of tabs and default to showing the requirements for the OS you are viewing from.
Changed user-tag reporting to no longer need a specified reason. Since the list of available tags is pre-approved now, the only reason to report a tag is if it is improperly applied to a specific game.

Browse by Tag page

Updated the visual presentation of featured titles at the top.
Items featured at the top no longer include items already in your library or that you’ve indicated as ‘Not Interested’.
Paging through lists of titles now remembers which page you were on.

Browse Free to Play & Browse Early Access pages

Updated with new visual styles.
Now includes multi-select filtering controls in the right-hand column to help narrow down search results based on tags, product type, feature, operating system, or language.
The default tab on these pages is now ‘Popular New Releases’.

Search page

Updated with new visual styles.
Now includes multi-select filtering controls in the right-hand column to help narrow down search results based on tags, product type, Steamworks feature, operating system, or language.
Updated page to function as browse page for more types of items. For example, ‘Items under $5’ and ‘Items under $10’ now point to the search page, which provides more powerful controls for filtering or sorting the results.
The filters you apply and the page you are on will be remembered when you click into a game page and then use the ‘back’ button to return to your search results.

Browse Demos page

Updated with new visual styles.
Added filtering controls to narrow results by tag, feature, or operating system.
Added pagination to allow for deeper exploration into the list of demos.
Demo page remembers which page of results you are on when you use the ‘back’ button in Steam or your web browser.

Steam News pages

Updated with new visual styles and larger type for improved readability.