It's no secret that Steam has broadened its scope in the last few years. It kind of feels like there are a hundred new games every month at this point. The rate at which ports from less robust platforms and incomplete early access experiences are coming in the door I feel like it's completely got away from me in the last few months.

The icing on the cake was the personalised storefront update from a while back. I rarely used Steam as an education platform for what's new and exciting but any merit it previously had in that department flew out the window with that update. Customizing down to exclusively show "Popular New Releases" and "Games" It's still a shitshow of pseudo-erotic visual novels, mobile ports, free to play titles and the most homogenous AAA new releases you can think of.

I'd love to know what sort of metrics they're using to gauge taste and greatly look forward to the any likely improvements such as adding curators or fully hiding tags from your store page.

Are you guys seeing the same stuff? It feels like a huge step back but I guess that comes with the territory right? When you start trying to please everyone eventually no one is totally happy.

Grumble grumble.

I really don't like that last big update either.

Everything they added, I don't care about, and it buries the stuff I do care about; daily deal/new releases.

They need to work harder on Steam OS and actually making games.

It still feels useless to me. Mostly because it constantly recommends me games I own on console. I could flip through all of them and mark them as uninterested... But why would I spend my time that way?

I rarely visit the steam store unless I'm going to get something specific. I don't even try to keep an eye on sales.

Steam was better when they didn't let just anything be published there. They honestly should've just improved Steam Greenlight (while still letting a fairly small number of release graduate through it), instead of opening up the floodgates to whatever Android port garbage wants to be on the service.

The new store page is a symptom of the problem, because for a couple months after they loosened the guidelines, the new releases list was just useless because like 10 games were coming out a day that were all garbage no one has ever heard of. So now they have to mask just how much garbage they're letting on the service and try to dynamically recommend the games that might actually be good.

Sure, there was the issue where some indies had to wait months to get on the service (pre-Greenlight, stuff like Gemini Rue and Frozen Synapse were available for months on the dev site before getting cleared for Steam), and then even after the launch of Greenlight there were still issues of pretty OK games like Cook, Serve, Delicious and Papers, Please and Divekick languishing for a few months before Valve did it's next big batch of "Hooray, this game is approved!" Still, I think fixing Greenlight would've been the better answer instead of turning Steam into a shitty anything-goes app store model.

I don't like it at all. I always have to go to "view all new releases" because it keeps filtering out all the games I'm interested in from the "popular new releases".

I don't mind that they're getting a lot of new releases these days, I'm just taking issue with that their attempts at curating that just fills the front page with early access survival games and hides all the interesting stuff.

I haven't used the frontpage of the store since they made that change, it got rid of any discoverability of new releases for me, and nothign in "my queue" was ever interesting, or there for a good reason.

I don't know if I like it, but it is better. If you're exploring/filtering through the store then it works best. Some of the elements, like recommendations, I wish could be hidden or moved. Overall though I think it looks better and is a bit easier to navigate, which were my major two faults with the store.

Honestly I forgot all about it until now.

I think the redesign is better but I feel like it's buckling under the weight of just so many god damn games. So many new releases. Every day it seems. I just don't really like shopping on steam anymore at all. The only thing I do now is scroll to the bottom right corner and click the "Below 10" or "Below 5" sections and then go to those lists. Then I have to check a million filters. Then my eyes glaze over starring at garbage. I can do it twice a year. Which works. You don't really need to buy PC games more than twice a year anyways.

This is how I feel. I find myself on GoG and (gasp) Origin more and more lately. Less game mess and the prices are competitive.

I can filter out early access games and software which is nice but their recommendation algorithm is useless. Play a strategy game for 2 days and all you get recommended is other strategy games. Played an horror game for 20mins? Out are all the strategy games, in are the horror games. Oh now you played some USF4? Guess will recommend you all 10 other fighting games on steam and nothing else...

I still think it sucks.

It's great. My Wishlist is massive now. Found a ton of little stuff I may not have found otherwise.

It's too busy. I only look at the Steam front page when there's a sale anymore. I don't use it to discover games anymore. I put things that I want on my wishlist and wait to be updated via email for sales.

i think it's pretty great. all i really ever see are games i haven't marked as "not interested" which, there aren't many

but that was kind of the point of the update, there's so many games that come out, it can be hard to not miss something, so i go through my queue regularly and keep it clean, and anything i am SUPER interested in goes on my wishlist, anything i MIGHT be interested in if there is a sale or something, i just move along and let it show up on my front page, anything i'm not at all interested in, gets marked as such and i only ever see it if it's on special.

it's led me to a lot of games i wouldn't have seen or checked out otherwise, and hidden a lot of bullshit i have no interest in, so overall it's great for me.

also for those who think recommendations are worthless or should be hidden, if you are as horrible and compulsive as me about this, they actually do disappear, this is what i always see at the bottom of my store page now.

The store page layout is fine all the HOT GARBAGE is what needs to go what the hell happened to steam jesus?

It's fine, I guess? I don't really have any problems with it, but to be fair I do not currently (nor have I ever, really) use Steam for discoverability purposes. I get most of my recs by word of mouth. The discovery queue is interesting, but it keeps showing me games based on me looking at different game pages that I looked at it because, wait for it, they were in yesterday's queue. They definitely need to fix that.

Haven't had a problem at all but then again I don't ever browse through that stuff because why would you ever just randomly look to buy something without knowing what you want.

So I just realized there were more things if you scrolled further down past the tiny valve / company text stuff.

Also I've never even clicked on the Queue.

Seems fine? I can still search for games I'm interested in. Never really just browse for random games.

The update hasn't changed all that much for me. Most of the time I only go to the steam store already equipped with a solid amount of information from Giantbomb, RockPaperShotgun, Totalbiscuit, Jim Sterling, Marbozir and a number of other critics, streamers and youtubers. Though the five mentioned above all have curator pages and I do enjoy having their little icons and blurbs as reminders of their recommendations. Ultimately I like that Steam offers some, admittedly still quite flawed, community features for critics that aren't big enough to support a full-on community like the Bomb crew.

The popular new releases are of no use to me and they've never been. I'm simply never looking for something new to play in a complete vacuum. A number of other little upgrades are occasionally useful to me. For example the "recently updated" section if you limit it to games you own. Games like Abyss Odyssey or Ziggurat frequently throw new features or enemies in and once I notice 2 or 3 small updates that's likely to make me want to do another run.

Bottom line: I still consider the update a small, awkward step in the right direction and I'm not too bothered since I don't need Steam to be the place to recommend games.

I think it's amazing that they updated the whole storefront and yet somehow, it still manages to look and operate in a really dated manner. They are smart in that the actual process of purchasing something remains incredibly quick and painless. Looking around for stuff still feels off though as there are moments where the art is too big and you don't get enough info on a page, while in other places everything shrinks so small you're overloaded with text and numbers.

I've never used the store to buy something other than clicking into the search box and typing the name of the game I want. I never "browse" games thinking "I'm going to buy a random game today", so any changes they make are pointless to me. They might as well just take Google's approach and have one big search box and that's it as far as my use is concerned.

It is an improvement, I guess.

The storefront doesn't really matter for me, I always get my recommendations elsewhere so I know exactly what I'm looking for. The only time I need to browse the store is during sales.

just wish i could zoom out.

I don't like it. At first I thought I did, but then I realized that was because the previous storefront had essentially been around since the time of our forefathers' forefathers and any change would have been welcomed. I dunno, man, it just doesn't feel as intuitive as I bet they think it does.

I haven't bought anything on Steam in like 6 months anyway. Hell, I've barely logged into to Steam during that time soooooooo meh whatever

god damn worthless.. but so is "new release" tab too - pages of cheap crap.

It's definitely devalued the main website for me now. I never look at it anymore. The New Releases, Coming Soon, and Specials tabs used to be quite useful but now there's so much crap on them that it makes them worthless to look at. At first I didn't get why they made it so you had to go to a separate page to view the specials but then I figured out that it's because there are so many garbage games that just stay almost perpetually on sale so that they can always appear in the specials tab and can potentially appear on the front page.

Also, they need to stop putting those "Free to Play" games that aren't actually free to play on the front page. There's a ton of them and most of them seem super sketchy. In many cases, to actually do anything in them you need money. One advertised itself as free to play but to play the campaign or unlock most of the multiplayer component required you to pay $30. And yeah, all those weird anime games no one outside of a small niche of people like keep showing up too.

Weirdly enough though, my "queue" of games to look at is usually pretty accurate. I just checked it and it was mostly full of strategy games, which is what I mostly play.

I appreciate that the change was done for at least a reason, there are plenty of sites that seem to love to change things up just... because, like a bored new manager who goes 'we should move all of the stock from that side of the room to that side of the room!'

But that being said the only thing I went to the store page for was a quick over view of new releases and the daily deal, now that shit feels way to buried/out of the way and I don't like it, but I wouldn't go out of my way to hate it either, it will probably change one day again anyways.

I don't use Steam to discover new games, so to me it's a big, bloated mess filled with stuff I don't care about. At least they allowed me to turn off the Early Access and Software categories.

i think the storefront is presented better.

i've never been the type to get game (or any product) recommendations from a 'front page' anyway, so whatever they put there has zero net effect on my purchasing behaviour. but it is surfacing stuff i'm not familiar with, so i suppose that's a plus.

and it does look better, to me.

Honestly I don't feel like I need a lack of clutter or incredible discoverability. Everything I'm interested in I discover through Giantbomb/game sites. The actual Steam store is only the last click for purchasing, and no matter how gross it is all I need to do is enter a name in a search bar at worst.

I understand how the OP's concerns are important of course, but after I thought about it for a second I realized I don't use Steam for uncovering games.