Valve has announced an open beta for their latest Steam client UI upgrade. The upgrade is significant, see below for details.
Steam is quickly becoming the PC gaming client / store of choice, with over 25 million users, over 1000 games available for purchase, 12 billion player-minutes of game time logged, and more significantly, every month, users have the Steam client open for more than 75 billion minutes.
Clearly, the Steam client user experience is a very important one for PC gamers - along with a personal achievements system, Steam frequently acts as a matchmaking service and a voice service for players. The new Steam UI beta offers a world of additional features for users of the system. The new features are opt-in and they're in beta. Current Steam users can go to Settings, and then select "UI Update" under Beta Participation to load the new interface. In my personal experience, a restart is also necessary to enable the update.
The new Steam client is making it easier for players to see what their friends play and own. From the Steam storefront, gamers will now be able to see which games their friends have purchased, and played. Likewise, the game library has changed significantly to focus on your Steam Friends list. "The new client introduces library customization tools to help gamers sort, group, and find games in libraries which for some hardcore players contain hundreds of titles. In addition to having lots of games, gamers needed methods of tracking all of their achievements in a standardized cross-game fashion, which is now possible with the new release." according to the Valve statement.
Each game in both the store and the games library also has a news feed associated with it - you can now see what game news outlets are saying about each game.
There's other news in this client beta as well - Valve has made the move to switch away from the Internet Explorer browser, and switch to "WebKit", the open source browser engine used by Google and Apple's browsers. The reason that this move is significant for PC users is that the performance is much greater / faster than it ever was. This is significant for the non-PC community, too. WebKit is cross platform, and may finally be signalling Valve's move toward a cross platform Steam client. One site has posted several "OSX-style" widgets included in one of the beta's folders.
Stage Select has asked for comment from Valve on the matter, we'll update the story if we hear back.
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