Greetings to everyone who loves good deals on great games (everyone, we hope?)!

The Steam Summer Sale means the entire Steam Store is filled with deals upon deals upon deals, as our official trailer above will attest. From now through July 9th at 10 a.m. Pacific (it's a long one, friends) you can pick literally any genre of gaming you love and find all sorts of sales.

Cooking battles, universe exploration, fighting with swords/guns/your fists, cozy games, football and basketball games, zombies, and more. Wait, we should list the "more", it's so good: there are even all-time greats that are on deep discounts throughout the sale.

The Steam Summer Sale is yours to explore in the shade of the summer (or in the warmth of the winter for our southern hemisphere friends): Now through July 9th at 10 a.m. Pacific. See you there!

The June edition of Steam Next Fest is live, with developers all over the world sharing their upcoming releases with you before they even launch! Peep our trailer (above) for a taste.

All week you'll find free demos to play across all genres, plus livestreams and developer chats throughout the week. Don't forget to wishlist your favorites to stay in-the-know as those games get ready for their official debut.

Steam Next Fest is on now through June 22nd at 10 a.m. Pacific. See you there!

Steam Bullet Fest is on now through June 15th at 10 am PT. As you can see from our trailer, there are all kinds of shoot-'em-ups offering discounts all week long!

You'll find hack-n-slashes, anime side scrollers, incremental bullet hells, and more. Join us now for Steam Bullet Fest, on through June 15th at 10 am Pacific!

Today we are excited to announce the release of the refreshed Steam Store home page. Thank you to everyone who opted into the Steam Client beta and provided feedback during the beta period. The updated design is a continuation of recent improvements across the Steam store, like the game page updates we made a few months ago.

Read on for details of the update:

Over the years we've introduced new sections and added more ways for you to discover and learn about games, and this update aims to make the store home feel more cohesive. Each section has a distinct set of tools and information to give users many ways to explore the diverse catalog of games on Steam. A goal of this visual refresh is to strike a balance between providing more consistency in UI elements, while allowing the unique nature of each section to show through.

There is now more detailed information highlighting the reason a game is being recommended to you; plus a user review round-up. When hovering over a game's cover art, the game's micro-trailer will play for a quick peek at the action. We also added a sneak-peek of the adjacent games in the carousel.

We've brought back two sections that you may have seen during our big seasonal sales permanently: Games currently on sale from your wishlist, and recommended DLCs for you on sale.

You can now find a personalized calendar right on the home page, giving you a quick way to see new and upcoming games recommended based on what you play. Page through to see new and exciting games that are coming out in the next two weeks or view your full calendar to look even further out. You can even see recommended new releases you may have missed.

A quicker way to browse titles in your Discovery Queue without leaving the home page.

We refreshed the design to bring this part of the store home in line visually and functionally with the rest of the sections. This includes a micro-trailer and screenshot preview display. Additionally, you can now click a screenshot to expand it.

The contents of this tab have been updated in response to player feedback in order to better capture the most anticipated releases of the coming month. If you're looking for more niche upcoming releases, check out your Personal Calendar (details above).

We've also shipped lots of upgrades to the details of what makes up the homepage. Here are a few of the bigger changes:

We know that bigger animated assets can be a problem for some folks. If you're sensitive to motion such as animated marketing assets or trailers that appear when hovering over games, we've got you covered: These things can be disabled by visiting your Store Preferences. When disabled on the home page we will switch to static screenshots instead of micro-trailers and use static marketing assets.

Users with a controller will see significant improvements to navigation on the homepage. This will mostly impact players on Steam Deck or using Big Picture Mode.

A short description is now presented along with other relevant information. The UI is updated to provide better contrast and legibility.

We're now displaying higher resolution game art for better visual clarity, making the most of the latest game art uploaded by developers.

Q. How long has this been in beta testing?

A. Since April 1.

Q. Can I personalize my view of the store?

A. Absolutely. You can customize your view by setting your store preferences, following game developers, and by ignoring individual games or tags.

Here's how to get started with editing your store preferences: https://store.steampowered.com/account/preferences/

• At the top of your settings, you'll find options for setting the level of mature content you are comfortable with. Steam breaks down mature content into five categories, which are based 1:1 on categories selected by the game developers, and double-checked by Steam's review team.

• As you scroll down your store preferences page, you'll see a number of options, including categories of products you wish to see, user tags to exclude, and individual products you've ignored in the past.

For Developers:

We are using higher resolution graphical assets in more places throughout Steam. We encourage you to review your game's graphical assets and update any missing or lower resolution assets from the store page editor. Visit the Graphical Assets documentation page for more information.

The latest update to Steam Workshop has just wrapped up a beta test period and is now deployed for everyone.

The next time you visit the Steam Workshop for your favorite game, you'll see an updated interface for browsing, searching, and filtering, making it easier and faster to explore and find great user-created mods to enhance your gaming experience.

Read on for details of this update.

The main Workshop page for each game has a fresh new layout, which can be customized by the game's developer.

By default, the page starts off with featuring the most popular mods based on user ratings in the past week.

Next, the page lists the available item tags to quickly browse relevant content, or you can flip through the tabbed section of "Most popular", "Most Subscribed", "Last Updated", and "Most Recent"

In some communities, certain items have become the foundation upon which many other mods are built, so we've added a section to highlight those important cornerstone mods that are required by other items.

And of course if you follow individual Workshop authors, or if your friends have uploaded items for that Workshop, the page will display sections for those too.

We've reworked the browsing and filtering experience to make the whole thing faster and easier.

Applying filters now happens much faster and without a page refresh, so it's easier to keep track of where you are and what has changed as a result of the filters you set.

We've also redesigned the page to make better use of wider screens, allowing more items per row. Now, for most players, you'll find four or five items per row instead of the previous limitations of three.

Saved Searches

When you've applied desired filters to narrow down to a set of interesting mods, you can also save your search query to get back to it quickly from the "Browse" menu.

Powerful search: titles and/or descriptions

Now, the search within Workshop defaults to searching both the title and description fields to find your desired term. You can click the gear icon next to the search field for more options and details on constructing complex search queries to narrow in on exactly what you are looking for.

Filter by required DLC

Some mods only work with content available in specific items of DLC for the game. You can now easily narrow down your searches to exclude items that require DLC that you don't have.

When hovering over any item in the Workshop, you'll find a new magnifying glass icon appear. Clicking that icon will open a new quick view of the item, with key details such as dates, file size, screenshots, description and ways to immediately subscribe, rate, or add to your favorites. Plus, you can use the arrows on left and right of the quick view to quickly browse through the same list of items you opened the quick view from.

In addition to description of the item you are viewing, the quick view panel also includes sections for other items or DLC that are required. You can also easily jump to all of the items that depend on the item you are looking at, as possibly an interesting way to explore some similar kinds of content.

Q. What if I find a bug? How do I give feedback on the changes?

A. Leave us a comment by clicking the 'Discuss' button below.

Q. Do you plan to update other pages in the Workshop?

A. Yes, but we don't have an exact timeline for when. Once we wrap up this beta of the browsing page, we'll have a better idea of scope of work for subsequent pages.

Q. Got any random Workshop trivia?

A. Absolutely, we love random trivia. Did you know...

• The mod with the most subscribers, is crashz' Crosshair Generator v3, which has been around since 2014. This mod helps players customize their crosshairs in Counter-Strike and has over 36M subscribers!

• The mod that is most depended on by other mod makers: the eloquently-named CBA_A3 for Arma 3 is a toolkit that over 19,000 other mods depend on.

• The Steam Workshop has 2,013 items with over 1 Million current subscribers. That is a whole lot of people customizing their gaming experience!

• There are 41 different games on Steam that have at least one item in their Steam Workshop with over 1 Million subscribers. Wallpaper Engine, Garry's Mod, Project Zomboid, DayZ, and Counter-Strike 2 make up the top 5 of those.

Today we've made some changes to the set of official store tags available on Steam, adding 17 new tags, removing 28, and merging/updating a handful of others. These changes are made with the goal of helping players identify the games that best fit their interests, and helping Steam generate appropriate recommendations.

Each year, we typically add a few new tags based on community feedback, but it has been a while since we last did so (Most recently in 2024 when we added Dice, Dwarf, Boomer Shooter, and Elf tags). In the time since, we've built up a list of tags to add, remove, and update.

Tags help developers better describe their game to players, but also help Steam understand what kind of game it is and show it accordingly to players via recommendations. Tags are also the foundation upon which each of the store hubs are built, allowing players to find all of the games tagged with their favorite genre, theme, style, or other relevant context.

Tags can be applied to a game by the developer, by players with non-limited accounts, and also by Steam moderators. This means that a game's tags can shift over time as more customers play the game and contribute their perspective on what tags are most relevant for each game. Over time, the types of games that exist and the way customers look at games changes too - so today, we have a list of changes to our current set of tags. Read on for specifics.

New tags are added when there are enough games on Steam that the tag could apply to, and when we think it helps establish a connection between games that couldn't already be attained through other combinations of tags. Some of these are content-specific, such as "Wolves" and "Zoo". Others represent broader genres such as "Bullet Heaven" and "Desktop Companion". And some tags cover specific game mechanics such as "Organizing" and "Decorating".

Here is the full list of tags added today:

• Bullet Heaven - The opposite of Bullet Hell; Focus on upgrades while automatically attacking hordes of enemies

• Desktop Companion - Games that only use part of your screen and keep you company while you do other things

• Organizing - Tidy up, de-clutter, or unpack, carefully placing items in virtual spaces

• Cleaning - Satisfying removal of grime and dirt from stuff

• Decorating - Creative placement of furniture and other objects

• Wuxia - Historical fantasy adventure featuring martial arts, competing sects, and inner qi

• Xianxia - Fantasy adventure focused on cultivating supernatural powers and strength

• Falling Blocks - Arranging, rotating, and placing blocks from above

• Espionage - Spying or secretly securing valuable intel

• Samurai - Japanese warriors best known for katanas, loyalty, and self-discipline

• Zoo - Care for and display a park full of wild animals

• Wolves - Also known as Canis Lupus

• Capybaras - The largest and possibly most adorable rodent species

• Animals - Cute and furry, or large and terrifying and everything in between

• Cult - Small groups with extreme devotion to a person, thing, or belief

• Poker - Draw, bet, and bluff

• Language Learning - Learning and teaching new languages

We haven't often removed tags from Steam, so we've built up quite a list. The set that we've removed today are done so because they no longer serve a good purpose for establishing connections between games or describing unique and useful elements of content in the game. Many of these tags have alternative options on Steam that better describe the content, and already have a high degree of overlap in application.

For example, both the "NSFW" tag and the "Mature" tag have a very high degree of overlap with more descriptive tags such as "Gore", "Violent", and "Sexual Content".

Some of the other tags that we are removing today are perhaps too subjective like "Well-Written" and "Masterpiece", resulting in disagreements and inconsistent application. Some tags just don't apply to very many products, such as "Drama" and "Ambient".

And lastly, there are a number of tags that apply to specific intellectual property, an attribute that community-sourced information like tags is not well suited for. These collections of intellectual property are typically already covered by the developers and publishers setting up franchise pages to collect together officially all the content shared by that IP.

Here is the full list of tags being removed:

• 3D Vision

• Ambient

• America

• Blood

• Crowdfunded

• Cult Classic

• Documentary

• Drama

• Dungeons & Dragons

• Electronic

• Experience

• Feature Film

• Foreign

• GameMaker

• Games Workshop

• Illuminati

• Kickstarter

• LEGO

• Masterpiece

• Mature

• Movie

• Narration

• NSFW

• Roguevania

• RPGMaker

• Warhammer 40K

• Web Publishing

• Well-Written

We also have a set of tags that we've renamed or merged together to clean up some redundancy or to explain the content more clearly.

• "Clicker" has been renamed into "Incremental" to capture the broader essence of games that focus on numbers going up.

• "Conversation" has been renamed to "Dialogue Heavy" for clarity

• We've made a few tags plural to match other tags: Dogs, Foxes, Vampires, Elves, Dwarves, and Assassins

• "Pool" was humorously applied to games with a swimming pool, so we've renamed this to "Billiards", which is the overarching term for all games played with cue sticks anyway

• Merging "Jet" into "Flight", as the term "Jet" was not unique enough.

• Merging "Unforgiving" into "Difficult" since these terms mostly overlap in usage and intent

Q. What do I do with this information?

A. If any of the newly added tags are of interest to you, feel free to explore the new store hubs to explore the relevant games. If you are aware of a game that should have one of these new tags and doesn't already, you can apply it yourself to help that game get categorized properly.

Q. How are tags applied to games?

A. User tags are applied by game developers in the process of preparing for release, and can also be applied by users to help fill in the gaps where games may be missing useful metadata. To add your own tag to a game, just visit the store page for a game and click the little "+" (Plus) symbol next to the list of tags that appear near the top of the page.

Q. What if I see a game tagged with something that is wrong or inaccurate?

A. Letting customers tag games directly adds a bunch of valuable data to the store. But yes, sometimes people deliberately mis-tag a game. If you see that, feel free to report it to Valve or the game developer- it's quick and easy for a developer to remove a tag if they need to do so. To report a tag you see, just visit the store page for a game and click the little "+" (Plus) symbol next to the list of tags that appear near the top of the page. That will open a pop-up with a list of tags. Just click the little flag that appears next to the tag you wish to report.

Q. What if I had marked as 'excluded' one of the tags that got merged or updated?

A. Your excluded tag should migrate with any changes, so that you're still ignoring the thing that you wanted. (FYI for those not familiar with excluding tags: You can exclude specific tags to filter them out of most places across the Steam store. Just visit your store preferences and scroll down to "Tags To Exclude")

Q. Why isn't my favorite tag on this list?

A. We are not all-knowing, so we sometimes miss stuff. Let us know in the comments. We also don't agree with the appropriateness of every tag that the community advocates for, so we may be unable to add every tag that y'all want.

Q. What are the most common tags on Steam?

A. The "Singleplayer" tag wins by being applied to over 98,000 games (about 62% of all games on Steam). The runner up is the "Indie" tag, which is applied to more than 82,000 games (about 53% of all games on Steam). Then "Action", "Casual", and "Adventure" in that order.