Steam News

Hello! With today’s update, you can now see the average framerate players get in games on Steam Deck.

This average is calculated using data from customers who have opted in to providing framerate data, and is available for games that have been tested for Deck compatibility (Verified, Playable, and Unsupported). As of this blog post, there are thousands of games with framerate data, and this number will grow as we continue to gather data. You can find average framerate data on each game’s Steam Store detail page under Steam Deck Compatibility > Learn more. This data is also available in your Steam Library on Steam Client Beta.

Framerate Histogram

We've also added an expandable detail view with a histogram breaking down the percentage of data samples at each framerate. This is useful to see how the average is produced, as well as how often people are running into hitches or stuttering (which show up as small columns in the lower framerate values).

Why we're adding this

The current Steam Deck Verified compatibility rating is based on standardized test criteria, but it may not match every customer’s bar for acceptable gameplay. This is especially true around performance - a game with an Unsupported rating due to unstable performance may be considered playable by some customers, and a Verified game may not reach a framerate that some customers prefer to play at. By providing average framerate data for each game, customers now have a more complete picture of how the game performs on Steam Deck and can make more informed purchase and play decisions.

What's next

We see this update as a stepping stone toward providing framerate data for more devices than just Steam Deck. To this end, we are also prompting customers to opt-in to providing anonymized framerate data in the Steam desktop client. This opt-in is currently only on Steam Client Beta, and will ship to all customers in the future.

As with all of our features, we'd love to hear your feedback so we can continue to improve things. Please let us know what you think in the comments.

FAQ

Where is this data coming from?

This data comes from Steam Deck players who have opted in to providing anonymized framerate data. A majority of Steam Deck players have opted in, representing a wide range of games and play styles.

How do I opt-in / opt-out of providing anonymous framerate data?

You'll be prompted in the Steam Library (see screenshot above), and you can also change this setting in Steam Account Settings > Data & Browsing > Anonymous Game Framerate Data.

This is great, but why is this limited to just players on Steam Deck? Why can't I see framerate data for all devices?

We're always looking for new ways to help developers understand the experiences customers are having with their games. We're starting with Steam Deck because every device has the same hardware configuration, making the data easier to understand. This also makes a better starting point for iteration as we learn what sorts of data and presentation are useful. Please let us know if you have feedback.

What does it mean when a game has a big gap between 90 and 45, like this?

Gaps like these are usually the result of a mismatch between the refresh rate of the display and the framerate that the game is trying to run at. This could be due to performance or because of a setting in the game itself. When this mismatch occurs, the system will sync the game's framerate to the display's native refresh rate to avoid graphical glitches (tearing).

Technical details: These gaps are a consequence of VSync. When a game is not making framerate, VSync will synchronize the game's framerate to the display's refresh rate in order to avoid image tearing. This means that on a 90Hz display, if a game has a framerate of 75fps, VSync will force the game to present as many frames as it can at 90fps, and when it can't make that target it will drop to 45fps, and then recover to 90fps for the next frame. This produces a pattern that averages 75fps, e.g. 90 90 45 90 90 45. Another example would be some games set an internal frame limit to 60, so on Steam Deck OLED set to default (90) it will bounce between 90 and 45 to hit 60 FPS.

Does the average framerate and histogram account for customers who change graphics settings?

The data used to produce the average framerate and the histogram is filtered to only show data from Decks that are set to the default frame limit to maintain a consistent performance bar (90 FPS for Steam Deck OLED, and 60 FPS for Steam Deck LCD). We don't account for custom in-game settings, but despite this we've found that the framerate data consolidates around relatively narrow ranges.

What if a game doesn't have many players?

To ensure the quality of the data, we have a minimum threshold of anonymous data points collected before we will generate and show average framerates and distribution to customers.

Domino VR
Domino VR is Now Available on Steam!

Build domino chains as big and silly as you like, then give them a push. Domino VR is a VR physics sandbox with real-scale dominoes, contraptions, 24 puzzle levels, a level editor and Steam Workshop sharing.
Team Fortress 2
An update to Team Fortress 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart Team Fortress 2. The major changes include:

  • Updated cp_wildcat_event to fix missing model for Spies disguised as pumpkins
  • Updated/Added some tournament medals
Team Fortress 2
An update to Team Fortress 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart Team Fortress 2. The major changes include:

  • Fixed smoke effect regression for Le Sapeur
  • Updated the Chief Executor, Vested Investor's Vest, and Standing Offer to fix clipping issues
  • Updated cp_wildcat_event
    • Added +1 minute to the round timer
    • Fixed a bug that allowed pumpkin-disguised players to cap at 15x speed
    • Fixed pumpkin-disguised players not displaying as Ubercharged if they have a Voodoo-Cursed Soul cosmetic equipped
    • Fixed buildings being able to be built inside the shutter door in the connector between A and B
    • Fixed some jack-o-lanterns around the map not rendering during the waiting for players period
    • Fixed equipped Powerup Canteens rendering while pumpkin-disguised
  • Updated Updated zi_atoll, zi_blazehattan, zi_devastation_final1, zi_murky, zi_sanitarium, and zi_woods
    • Lowered edicts across the board
    • Zombie Sniper's Spit now deals critical hits to airborne targets
    • Fixed Zombie Engineer building status being visible upon initial infection
    • Fixed Reveal outline persisting on players into the next round
  • Updated zi_atoll (additional changes)
    • Fixed a visual bug where water would disappear in certain parts of the map
    • Added more cover in front of the shack
    • Enabled every BLU spawn point no matter where RED players are located
Steam News

Steam Scream is back for a fifth year of terrifying everyone... with amazing deals on spooky games! From now through November 2nd at 10 a.m. PT you can make your way through the Steam Store to find horrors of all kinds: psychological, slasher, silly, you name it.

Fill up your trick-or-treat bucket Steam library with your favorite scary games, and we bet you'll want to keep playing them well past the horror of the Halloween holiday itself.

Join us now for Steam Scream V... if you dare. (You totally should dare, to be clear.)

Steam News

With today's Steam update, the Personal Calendar feature officially graduates from Steam Labs and is considered a full feature of the Steam Store. You can find it right on your Steam store homepage, or by visiting https://store.steampowered.com/personalcalendar

About the Personal Calendar

The Steam Personal Calendar is another way to see recommended games for you, showing both recently released and upcoming games filtered down to the the set of games we think you are most likely to be interested in. It uses your recently played games to find people with similar playtime profiles to you, and then looks at the games those players have been adding to their wishlist or playing.

  • Based on games you play a lot: The system focuses on your playtime for games that you play the most. So, a few minutes trying out a new game or two won't have much impact on your recommendations, but sinking a bunch of time into a new favorite will.

  • Refreshed daily: This recommendation system gets re-trained daily to incorporate the latest data. In reality you aren't likely to see your recommendations change all that much from day to day, but as time goes by you will obviously see new things pop up as the 8-week horizon of the calendar marches forward, or as games lock in their release dates.

Expanding The Ways You Can Explore Games

The Steam Store has a number of different methods for recommending games. Some sections of the front page trend toward showing more popular games and some sections trend toward showing games similar to those you play regardless of how long ago they released. The Personal Calendar was designed to fill a gap in between: to help players find popular and niche games that may be of interest and are new or soon to release.

This approach seems to resonate strongly with many players, as we're seeing a lot of you exploring and clicking on games in the Personal Calendar.

For example, in an average 24-hour period, players click on over 2,000 different games on in the Steam Personal Calendar. That shows that not only is the calendar succeeding at matching games with players most likely interested, but also that players are exploring deep into their calendars to see what has recently released or is coming out far in the future.

Why Steam Labs?

The Personal Calendar first released as a Steam Labs experiment in October of 2025. Steam Labs is our designation for new store and discovery features that we think are interesting, but that need more focused feedback to be refined into a polished product. With eleven months of feedback from players and developers, we've been able to refine the Personal Calendar into a great way to discover new games.

During the course of development while in Steam Labs, we've made a number of improvements big and small. For example, we added the ability for game developers to specify a date they intend to release from Early Access to 1.0 so that we could list these titles on the calendar. We also added better filtering tools and display options for things like wishlisted games, Early Access games, and DLC. Extensive work was also put into making the new feature work smoothly across different devices, including desktop PC, mobile devices, and SteamOS devices.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Where can I learn more about how the Personal Calendar works?

A. We just put out a new video and documentation aimed at helping game developers understand how the Personal Calendar works for surfacing their games. Check it out here if you are interested in more of the details:

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/visibility/personalcalendar

Q. Did any of these games pay to be shown to me?

A. No, we don't sell placement on the Steam Personal Calendar, or anywhere else on Steam. The Personal Calendar also isn't hand-curated. The featuring in the personal calendar is done algorithmically and it is personalized for each user. If you're curious about how visibility works on Steam, we put together a great set of documentation and video for game developers here:

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/visibility

Q. Will I get stuck in a bubble of recommendations only like the games I've been playing lately?

A. We're also concerned about the potential for getting stuck in a filter bubble (getting too narrow of recommendations), so we work hard on keeping things varied. With the Personal Calendar, it's unlikely that every day has a new game launching that is the same genre/theme as games you've been playing and is also a good recommendation for you. As a result, the recommendations generated by the Personal Calendar end up drawing from a wider pool of titles across all kinds of genres that are releasing each day.

About Steam Labs

In the pursuit of building a better platform and shopping experience, the Steam Team are continually experimenting with new ideas around discoverability, video, machine learning, and more. Some of these experiments are clear and obvious upgrades to existing features, or are part of products we've already decided to build, and they get built out and released. Other times, we end up with experiments where we feel like we would benefit from more input from Steam users to help inform the direction that we take it, or whether it is even interesting enough to turn into a full feature.

With Steam Labs experiments, you can try, share, and break these potential new features, while we figure out what to keep and what to scrap. Share your feedback with the developers and designers working on these features and help shape the future of Steam.

Check out all experiments on the Steam Labs page or drop us some feedback in the Steam Labs discussion boards.

Steam News

The October edition of Steam Next Fest has begun, with thousands of FREE demos awaiting your gaming fingers. Check out the trailer above for a sneak peek of the variety of games you'll find!

We host Steam Next Fest three times a year (February, June, October) as a way to highlight games before they've launched. Developers from all over the world share their demos, and by wishlisting your favorites (after playing them for free!) you can keep up with their path to official launch on Steam.

New for this edition: we've made some changes to (hopefully) make it easier to browse the fest. Now you can search by genre, theme, feature, and even sub-category. Our video below gives you a quick tour.

The October 2026 edition of Steam Next Fest runs through October 26th at 10 a.m. Pacific.

Have fun!

-The Steam Team

(Below: Our welcome video with a quick tour of the updated navigation for Steam Next Fest)

Team Fortress 2
An update to Team Fortress 2 has been released. The update will be applied automatically when you restart Team Fortress 2. The major changes include:

  • Fixed some maps not tracking play time correctly
  • Fixed alpha channel for the updated Cozy Camper backpack image
  • Updated cp_holyhell
    • Fixed BLU side skybox not rendering for users with HDR enabled
    • Improved RED side art pass
    • Improved middle point art pass
    • Spells get enabled and respawn permanently on the side of the team that loses middle. This can go both ways.
    • Lowered round timer to 5 minutes
    • After 5 minutes of any team capturing middle, instead of a stalemate, every spell gets turned into a rare variant and respawn extremely quickly. After a point gets captured in the stalemate state, the spells return back to normal.
    • Lowered respawn wave times
    • Gargoyles now only spawn near middle
    • Better optimization
  • Updated Updated zi_atoll, zi_blazehattan, zi_devastation_final1, zi_murky, zi_sanitarium, and zi_woods
    • Fixed player models being invisible in dx8
    • Fixed tiling HUD icon for Heal ability
    • Fixed bad number display in the "Auto-spawn" text in the spawn picker
    • Updated Zombie Engineer's Beacon
      • Instead of instantly breaking, beacons inside of tight spaces will now place themselves in the closest valid location
      • Fixed thrown toolboxes appearing offcenter
      • Thrown toolboxes now break upon touching all clip brushes if they can't find a nearby valid location
    • Zombie Sniper Spit cooldown changed from 9 seconds to 6 seconds
    • Updated Zombie Pyro
      • Increased Zombie Pyro's melee damage from 45 to 65
      • Sticky Spew now applies a 20% movement slow
      • Standing on puddles of sticky spew applies an additional 20% movement slow
      • Sticky spew puddles are now larger
      • Spewed Demoman shield movement slow changed from -60% to -70%
      • Humans covered in sticky spew are now tinted purple instead of black
      • Zombie Pyro's death explosion now deals 50 damage, applies afterburn, and turns themself and victims to ash
    • Fixed Zombie Heavy exploding into rock gibs when not holding a rock
    • Fixed the Homewrecker not being able to destroy EMP grenades
    • Updated Zombie Demoman charge kill icon
    • Changed Zombie melee impact sounds into fists instead of the sloppy wet Unarmed Combat
    • Fixed Zombie Spy dealing more damage than intended
    • Fixed queue events with some zombie abilities
    • Fixed Zombies sometimes moving slowly after casting an ability
Steam News

We're starting a beta for Steam Achievement Sets, a new feature aimed at improving the achievement experience on Steam.

Games today live longer than ever, continuing to receive updates through new DLC, expansions, and seasons. But achievements added with new game content can be hard to discover and can accidentally break the completion status of players who have already finished the game.

We have designed Achievement Sets to help address these types of issues. You can try them out in today's Steam Client beta and in a growing set of games that have already added support.

Introducing Achievement Sets

This beta enables developers to group their game's related achievements together in collections we are calling Achievement Sets. Devs can specify the number of sets and the purpose of each to match their game's specific needs. You can imagine one game grouping its achievements into single-player and multiplayer sets, or another into 8 class-based sets.

In games that support sets, you still unlock achievements by playing the game as usual. But when you browse what you have unlocked afterward, Steam will break the long list of game achievements into the developer-created sets, making it easier to see what you have completed and to find other related achievements you can unlock next.

Each Achievement Set also has its own progress bar showing how far along you are in that area. Once you have unlocked every achievement in a set, Steam will commemorate the moment and add a "set complete" trophy to your profile. If new achievements are later added to the set, your completion is preserved.

As a game grows, developers can create new sets to hold achievements for the added content. These new sets make it easy for returning players to see what new things they can unlock, while also preserving their prior completion status until they play again.

There are two types of Achievement Sets.

Base Game Achievement Sets

Base Game sets contain achievements that can be earned by all players who play a game. Their progress and trophies are displayed in blue on your achievements page.

DLC Achievement Sets

Some games contain achievements that can only be earned once you have purchased additional content (DLC) for that game. These achievements can now be grouped into new DLC sets, allowing you to separately track what you have unlocked in the new content.

DLC achievements are not included in your overall game progress until you have access to the content. Once acquired, they will be displayed as purple progress and trophies on your achievements page.

All possible achievements for a game can be explored from the new achievements page, so if you are curious, give the page a skim to see what the game's DLC has added.

Seasonal Achievements

We are also introducing the ability for game developers to archive individual achievements or entire Achievement Sets. We think there are a lot of fun ways games can take advantage of the temporary nature this can add, such as adding achievements to season-based games or enabling time-limited holiday achievements.

Once archived, users who had already unlocked the achievement or set will still see it on their profile. However, archived achievements won't show up on the profile pages of users who missed the unlock nor block their progress toward completing a set or game. Anytime an achievement can no longer be unlocked by users, it should be archived.

A New Achievements Page

Bringing this all together is an updated achievements page, accessible from your Games List on the web and from games in your Steam Library. The new page gives you a summary of your overall progress, progress in each achievement set, and details on individual achievements.

Global Stats, or the per-achievement completion rates, are now available as a toggle here rather than on a separate page.

Search has also been expanded with filters for specific achievement sets and for locked or unlocked achievements. Plus, there's a little extra joy when you complete all your achievement sets.

You can now compare your game progress with up to three friends, including rare achievements, completed sets, and progress in DLC sets. You'll see both the number of achievement sets you've completed and a new, more accurate total achievement count, making it easier to compare your progress with friends. This total is based on achievements each player can actually earn, which may vary depending on the add-on content they have and whether certain achievements are time-limited or archived. As a result, the total can differ from friend to friend. 

And More

We've rebuilt a few areas where achievements are displayed, to show off your overall achievement and set progress throughout Steam. You'll see your completed sets on your profile in the Recently Played section, your Games List, your Library, and more.

  • The Perfect Games tab is now called Completed and expands to show both completed games and games with completed achievement sets.

  • Games with completed achievement sets can now be added to the Completionist Showcase, in addition to completed games.

  • Games played via Family Sharing are now displayed in the Games List.

  • Friends with playtime in a game through Family Sharing are now eligible for friend comparison.

  • Store and Library game pages will now show if a game has achievement sets.

Try It Out Now

These updates are now available as a beta for both players and game developers. Here's how to join the Steam Client Beta. We'll continue making improvements during the beta, so make sure to let us know what you think.

As developers begin using the new tools, you'll start seeing these changes appear for supported games.

The following games have already added achievement sets:

Are you a game developer interested in seeing how easy it is to add achievement sets? Read the Steamworks blog post here.

Steam News

Steam Cooking Fest is just begging for us to use cooking puns, but we're way too mature for that.

(Except for our headline here. OK and also our trailer.) The rest of this post, though? Pun-free!

Are there cooking games of all kinds on sale for the week? Definitely. Run a restaurant, operate a food truck, cook for giant onions and rats and all kinds of things!

Join us now for Steam Cooking Fest, on through October 19th at 10 am Pacific on Steam.

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