Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Valve Reveals New Look Steam, Beta

By John Walker on February 24th, 2010 at 12:40 am.

Shiny and new.

Crikey, there’s a new Steam then. Valve explains that “in the last 12 months Steam has grown 200%. There are now 25 million users, 1000+ games, 12 billion player minutes per month, and 75 billion Steam client minutes per month.” Which means they need a newer, fresher Steam.

The opt-in beta is apparently now open. Except that it currently won’t let me onto it. Which is annoying. It seems that it takes a few minutes to wake up after a client update. I have to learn patience. To get complete details of the changes, head here. And if you’ve got Steam running then clicking here should open up the options to get you into the beta. Lots more information below.

It’s a complete overhaul. All new UI, new code, new everything. So here’s a few highlights.

There’s to be a greater emphasis on the social networking side of things, as you might expect. Or as I like to think of it, ways of spying on your buddies.

“Right from within your own game Library, you can now track which of your friends plays each game or invite them to play one with you. Before you’ve even bought a game, knowing whether your friends play it is one of the most useful pieces of information to have. So on the store homepage, there’s a new listing of what your friends have bought or played lately.”

There’s a new news feed, bringing info on the games they sell, both from inside and outside Valve. And a new way to organise achievements, because apparently people care about the bloody things.

I’m very pleased to see there’s a way of organising your game library. If you’ve been buying giant bundles during the holiday sales, you probably are too.

Certainly one of the highlights about the redesign is the shedding of Internet Explorer. It always bewildered me that this most crusty of browsers underpinned it all. Now it’s using WebKit-based rendering magic, which should hopefully speed everything up a deal.

Lots more details here.

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170 Comments »

  1. 24/02/2010 at 00:47 Ross Sigworth says:

    You can force steam to check for a client update. After doing that for me the beta showed up

  2. 24/02/2010 at 00:49 Ging says:

    it’s really quite pretty, the layout is much, much easier to navigate now.

    either restart steam or force a client update to get the beta to show up in your settings.

  3. 24/02/2010 at 00:49 Adz says:

    Sweet. I had to update the Steam client before I could get onto the beta, but I’ve got it now. Looks brilliant, webkit is a definite improvement. The new library is fantastic. All round excellence, even the grayer tray icon fits better with my theme :D

  4. 24/02/2010 at 00:49 Miker says:

    Slick. Very slick. And lots of features I’ve actually always wanted — like who actually plays a game, so I can decide which games to install.

  5. 24/02/2010 at 00:51 Adz says:

    Just noticed – clicking News takes you to the Store tab for some reason. Don’t know if it’s intentional during beta, or a bug.

  6. 24/02/2010 at 00:55 Snidely says:

    Too bad it also seems to have broken my Friends list. Groups are fine, but friends have disappeared.

  7. 24/02/2010 at 00:56 Po0py says:

    I love how the game library has a background image for each game. It’s also a bit zippy compared to the old steam. That will be the new browser engine.

    This is all rather splendid.

  8. 24/02/2010 at 00:59 jsutcliffe says:

    Excellent — and I’ll bet making it webkit-based will enable them to release a Mac client too, which would be grand.

    • 24/02/2010 at 03:02 SquareWheel says:

      Is there even any mac-games on the store? I’ve heard rumors of the source engine being ported, but…

    • 24/02/2010 at 03:09 jsutcliffe says:

      Why would there be Mac games in the store when Steam doesn’t run on a Mac? I mean that it’ll open up the Mac user base to Steam’s money train.

    • 24/02/2010 at 03:19 somnolentsurfer says:

      Oh please ohpleaseohplease…

      This was my first thought when I read about it too. And then i loaded it, and noticed the more Mac-like control corners, and the “File” menu becoming “Steam” and other nice touches and I got very excited indeed. Seriously, Valve, please.

      Quite a lot of the games on Steam have Mac versions. A good few of the indie titles (World of Goo, Braid) and the EA ones (Dragon Age: Origins), for example. I’d hope that buying a game on one platform would give me access to both versions. That would effectively make Steam the platform rather than Windows, and it could redefine PC gaming. I really hope they do it.

      Other than that, pretty! Quick! Clock on the overlay!

  9. 24/02/2010 at 01:00 litrock says:

    Hrm. I like it, but man, the cool visual panels in the library make my non-steam games I’ve added to steam look INCREDIBLY ghetto. There should be a way to upload images for those panels. I’d be the loser who bothered to make something for those.

  10. 24/02/2010 at 01:00 Drexer says:

    Now using a WebKit based rendering engine for the client and in-game overlay web browsing components (replacing Internet Explorer)

    *Cries with sweet, sweet happyness*

    • 24/02/2010 at 01:50 Alex says:

      That was my favorite part of this announcement… Good night, sweet IE.

    • 24/02/2010 at 03:18 Deuteronomy says:

      Can you choose to use IE8 if you don’t want to install webkit?

    • 24/02/2010 at 05:04 ascagnel says:

      Deuteronomy, you don’t “install” WebKit — it gets bundled into what app is using it, and this allows Steam to be a bit more nimble in that they can update their WebKit use more frequently than if they were using the IE widget they previously were.

    • 24/02/2010 at 05:06 destx says:

      You don’t have to install Webkit. It’s integrated into Steam.

      And I don’t see any option to use IE as the renderer (Why the fuck would you want to?).

    • 24/02/2010 at 12:02 James G says:

      I’m glad I’m not the only one who was excited by this. I feel incredibly geeky that WebKit is my favourite rendering engine because A) It means I have a favourite rendering engine B) It actually differs from my favourite browser (Opera).

  11. 24/02/2010 at 01:02 TimA says:

    Mmmmmmmmmm. This is nice, cleaner and faster. I like the way screenshots and videos are displayed on the store game pages. Though I’d still like to be able to collapse my window down in to a thin list of games I can double-click on… can I do that somehow?

  12. 24/02/2010 at 01:04 C. Guray says:

    Steam Friends & Community services were down for past 12 hours but I haven’t seen the new look yet. Since it was impossible to play MW2 & L4D without community connection, I hope the new look is worth it.

  13. 24/02/2010 at 01:04 SpinalJack says:

    s’about time!
    Lots of nice touches there not least the ditching of IE

  14. 24/02/2010 at 01:06 Gurthang says:

    This looks like a way better look than previous one, however I can’t seem to make it work. :(

    Every time I open Steam it immediately closes and I can’t play anything. Please help me.

    • 24/02/2010 at 01:22 sovere1gn says:

      Same thing happening here. I haven’t tried to restart my PC though.

      Edit: steam.exe -clearbeta
      Worked.

    • 24/02/2010 at 01:28 Man Raised By Puffins says:

      As John said, it takes a while for the update to work through.

      I like it, nice and swanky. My favourite change is the Steam updater no longer reverting to the manky original UI.

    • 24/02/2010 at 05:26 ascagnel says:

      I’ve been getting silent crashing with the beta when I try to view webpages. Try clearing the beta, setting your default window to “My Games,” and then re-enabling the beta.

  15. 24/02/2010 at 01:06 Snuffy (the Evil) says:

    I don’t know what I think yet. The new browser engine is nice, but the games list seems… off. Maybe that’s just because I’m so used to the old way.

  16. 24/02/2010 at 01:07 Mr. ThreEye says:

    I found the old steam really slow, is there much improvement in tis new shizzle?

  17. 24/02/2010 at 01:08 billyboob says:

    FINALLLLLLLLLLLLLYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!

  18. 24/02/2010 at 01:11 duel says:

    after a moments pause for thought, I realised I’m actually quite excited!

  19. 24/02/2010 at 01:11 Vanderdecken says:

    Now using a WebKit based rendering engine for the client and in-game overlay web browsing components (replacing Internet Explorer)

    *Cries with sweet, sweet happyness*

    Likewise. Also, favourite servers are now stored in the cloud, like your Friends – brilliant for me, as my favourite servers are consistently the only thing I forget to back up before formatting my PC. >.<

  20. 24/02/2010 at 01:12 Sucram says:

    Well all the UI text is missing for me, so erm.. that may be a bug.

  21. 24/02/2010 at 01:18 gryffinp says:

    I can’t seem to get the webkit thing to work. Any webpage based stuff, store, community, renders as a blank white page.

    Other than that. Nice.

    • 24/02/2010 at 05:30 ascagnel says:

      A bug related to the default settings of Windows. Unless you use proxies, go to Settings -> Internet Options -> Connections -> LAN Settings and clear the “Automatically configure” checkbox (I forget the exact text offhand). I had the same issue, but clearing that tick box greatly sped up the rate at which the default view loaded the background info and allowed the other views to load (although those have crash bugs…)

  22. 24/02/2010 at 01:20 CMaster says:

    For some reason, this beta has made it redownload CoH.
    Odd.

  23. 24/02/2010 at 01:23 malkav11 says:

    The moment I saw this, I was thinking “Please let them have ditched IE, please let them have ditched IE”, and read all through the list of features and was like, yes, but…have you ditched IE? And then, at the very bottom? Joy.

  24. 24/02/2010 at 01:23 hoff says:

    I love the updates but… IT CRASHES ON START UP!

    That’s especially weird since I don’t know how to reset the beta and access my games at all now. Great.

  25. 24/02/2010 at 01:24 Lucas says:

    The most important question is: can it block the RPS group TF2 event popups?

  26. 24/02/2010 at 01:26 CMaster says:

    Hmm. Sad to see the “small games list”, my default mode has gone.

    • 24/02/2010 at 01:38 Camilo says:

      OMG no! :(

      Also, I just updated too and now it’s simple not working. I open it, logs in and then it closes. I can’t play my games until this gets fixed!

    • 25/02/2010 at 11:43 JB says:

      Ihad this problem too, I tried about 3 times with a short gap between, then it worked. Although I’m sure there’s a better way

  27. 24/02/2010 at 01:27 Jugglenaut says:

    Just started it having only looked at the games page, and I already love it. I have been wanting a better games page since my list got unwieldy after the last couple holiday sales.

  28. 24/02/2010 at 01:43 LewieP says:

    does it do aero snap now?

  29. 24/02/2010 at 01:46 DarkNoghri says:

    Oooooo, I just checked the new in-game overlay, and I LIKE. The fact that they finally ditched IE also made me happy.

    On the other hand, it could be a bit faster still. It just seems a bit sluggish.

  30. 24/02/2010 at 01:48 Oak says:

    They seem to have added achievements for Half-Life 2.

    • 24/02/2010 at 03:23 Stabby says:

      I think that was quite a while ago, actually. Maybe around when Ep 1 or 2 came out?

    • 24/02/2010 at 05:10 Oak says:

      I know they exist in Ep2, but never for the previous games. So far as I’m aware, anyway.

    • 24/02/2010 at 05:13 Vinraith says:

      @Oak

      You’re correct that, on the PC, there were no achievements for HL2 and Ep 1, even after Ep 2 launched. IIRC, the Xbox 360 version of the Orange box DID have achievements for HL2 and Ep 1 included, perhaps they finally got around to porting them over?

  31. 24/02/2010 at 01:51 radomaj says:

    @Snidely That’s not connected to this beta. I mean, it may be, but many people lost their Friendslist before they opted into it. (like me, for example)

  32. 24/02/2010 at 01:57 Mman says:

    I haven’t explored it much yet, but any issues it does have are instantly forgiven from me simply because it has somehow fixed an issue that’s made Hammer completely unusable to me for the last couple of months.

  33. 24/02/2010 at 01:57 hustlerose says:

    It looks nice but its redownloading mw2 and tf2 even though i had them both installed…so there goes 15 gigs of comcast bandwidth?

    • 24/02/2010 at 02:10 hustlerose says:

      update: i restarted steam and tried to play TF2 and it installed the latest (small) update and then worked. I then tried to play mw2 MP and it started at 4.5gb/11gb downloaded (Even though it started at 0gb when i first opened steam) however the free size of my C: drive went up so it definitely deleted something.

  34. 24/02/2010 at 01:57 Samuel Bigos says:

    Installed it, looked at the new library and changed back. The large icons make finding the game you want a scroll fest, and non steam games have really bad icons. They seem to have ditched the small icons which were perfect, and now you can’t have favorites and non favorites on the same page, you have to select from a dropdown which one you want.

    It’s also a lot more bloated, there is space everywhere which doesn’t need to be there (when you click on a game the actual information starts half way down the page, not to mention the IM windows).

    Other changes seem good but the library is what 90% of the time I’m on and for me it’s a downgrade.

  35. 24/02/2010 at 02:08 Frosty says:

    IT’S SO PRETTY!

  36. 24/02/2010 at 02:09 Purple0limar says:

    Uhh, just so you know… The beta’s shell appears to be screwing with the interface. At least, on mine, I can’t reach any nonlocal pages.

  37. 24/02/2010 at 02:14 Dante says:

    Well right now it seems that it quits out half way through the paypal process when trying to buy Call of Prypriat, so I guess it’s back to the original until they work the kinks out.

  38. 24/02/2010 at 02:14 ManaTree says:

    Woohoo!

    Several problems though:
    - Could use a little more polish that typical Windows applications use
    - Why can’t I freakin’ run media with something OTHER than WMP?
    - The minimum width of the thing is huge.
    - Make the scroll-y thing a little faster. It’ll feel more slick, more attentive.

    And others! Stay tuned when I’m off my arse to write about it.

    Also, I’ve got both CoH and TF2 and they aren’t downloading like you folks. Weird. Seriously, sometimes, computers just make me go “wut”, because not everyone has the same problem…I guess I’m fortunate though, I tend to not have problems.

  39. 24/02/2010 at 02:14 Phinor says:

    Crashes on startup, no fix available yet but they are probably working on it (yes, I deleted steam.dll, clientregistry.blob etc., they don’t work).

    What worries me is the font I see in those screenshots. Seems like it’s even more blurry/clearfonted/whatever you want to call it, than before? Pixel perfect font is in my opinion the only way to go but seems more and more people prefer blurring fonts in their software so I guess I’m once again in the minority with my opinion.. heck, it get harder and harder with every new Windows to get the real pixel perfect font back but at least Windows 7 still partially supports it. Most software don’t support it anymore and it saddens me very much.

    • 24/02/2010 at 02:17 Miker says:

      I thought I was the only person that noticed the blurry fonts. It’s like someone at Valve likes how fonts look on a Mac.

  40. 24/02/2010 at 02:25 Marcin says:

    Whoah. I think I’m in love with Grid View for the games list. So clean. So accessible. So purty!

  41. 24/02/2010 at 02:26 skinlo says:

    Apart from deleting COH, this looks pretty cool! I love the library downloads tab which shows the individual download speeds of the games!

  42. 24/02/2010 at 03:10 mda says:

    The old library was much easier. Why why why why why!

    New friends list and web stuff is awesome! Damn you library!

    And no you can’t fix it by going to list mode : Before, you could one-click-favourite games, seperating them from the others neatly. Now the icons are massive and you can’t seperate faves/nonfaves/uninstalled games while still displaying all of them. It takes forever to find what game you want!

  43. 24/02/2010 at 03:17 mda says:

    The old library was much easier.

    New friends list and web stuff is awesome

    Before, you could one-click-favourite games, seperating them from the others neatly. Now the icons are massive and you can’t seperate faves/nonfaves/uninstalled games while still displaying all of them. It takes forever to find what game you want!

    I APOLOGISE FOR MY HONEST COMMENT. WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?

    EDIT: Turns out you can use the old way: Go to list mode, click the “+” top right corner to turn off images. Hover over where add to favourites should be, and it appears. Also, right click games to add to new categories. Viva la new!

  44. 24/02/2010 at 03:30 Phil Wells says:

    I added some custom categories for my games, played a bit of Torchlight, then when I came back to Steam all my newly added categories had been deleted.

    Like the new overlay though.

  45. 24/02/2010 at 03:39 Bakaneko says:

    I agree completely with the list issue. Sure, the new stuff is pretty, but I found it much harder to set up to get to the games I want to play most while still having information on the screen about the games I COULD install/play/whatever. Some sort of nod to split panes or multiple list boxes, or something would be appreciated.

    Also, while pretty, its a little… large right now… on a 1920×1200 monitor it seems to want a lot of real estate to display very little information.

  46. 24/02/2010 at 04:05 JuJuCam says:

    People wanting old list view functionality should bear in mind that like all sensible lists, it can be sorted by clicking on the ‘list titles’ (‘Games’, the favourite star, the cloud for steam cloud support, etc etc.). With proper categorisation finding the games you want to play should never be easier with the additional bonus that you may even accidentally rediscover games you own but haven’t played in a while or installed.

  47. 24/02/2010 at 04:08 KP says:

    sexy. and readable.

  48. 24/02/2010 at 04:13 Kebab says:

    Updated. It has broken my steam installation. Tries to update and fails. Tried to uninstall and reinstall: fails. Tried to delete all files in C:program files/steam and cleaned the registry. Still fails, says there is an existing exe/need administrator permission. Now I find there is a steam rar file in the steam directory which it wont let me delete, saying I need administrator permission.

    Great.

  49. 24/02/2010 at 04:14 Sp4rkR4t says:

    My word, no more IE dependence, opens links in the correct browser, orders of magnitude faster response and it’s feckin gorgeous. Very well done valve you have finally eliminated all the little client things I despised about Steam.

    • 24/02/2010 at 04:23 Vinraith says:

      @Sp4rkR4t

      Wow. I was going to blow this off as a pointless redesign, but if it actually does everything you just said I think I’ll go download the beta.

  50. 24/02/2010 at 04:28 Vinraith says:

    What would be really brilliant is if this finally made offline mode truly reliable. I’d actually have to stop bitching about Steam so much if it did!

    • 24/02/2010 at 06:45 JuJuCam says:

      Offline mode is working for every game I’ve thrown at it, including ones that definitely didn’t work beforehand. Notably even GfWL enabled games (Street Fighter 4) and Steam Cloud enabled games (Torchlight) seem to work fine. I was even able to run Left 4 Dead. You may indeed have one less thing to worry about, Vinraith!

    • 24/02/2010 at 08:12 Vinraith says:

      @JuJuCam

      That games that would never work in offline before are working now is very encouraging. However, obviously you just updated, and most games work right after an update. The question is, given a bit of time, will they still work?

      Here’s hoping.

  51. 24/02/2010 at 04:36 Corporate Dog says:

    I know. This is a post about Steam. But the peekture shows Commander Shepard, and I just finished ME2, and I must vent, so…

    NOOOOOO!!!! I complete the suicide mission! And my squad is mostly intact! But, lo, who should be my one casualty?

    Yeah. The very model of a scientist Salarian. Fucking Collectors. Fucking Reapers. I am now denied Mordin for ME3, and am greatly vexed by it.

    • 24/02/2010 at 05:12 Nick says:

      Thats worth trying again.

    • 24/02/2010 at 05:28 Vinraith says:

      @Corporate Dog

      I agree with Nick, I’d replay the ending if I were in your position. I made it through without losing any specialists, but there were certainly some characters I wouldn’t have replayed the mission to save. Mordin is not one of those characters.

  52. 24/02/2010 at 04:52 Wisq says:

    Fun, I’ve locked myself out of Steam. I opted in to the UI update, it can’t talk to the servers to update, and without being able to launch it, there’s no way for me to opt out.

  53. 24/02/2010 at 05:24 Hybrid says:

    Looking very good and no more IE!

    • 24/02/2010 at 08:58 Don says:

      Amen to that. Nothing more irritating than to have Firefox set up as your default only for Steam to start trying to open IE windows when you open additional windows.

    • 24/02/2010 at 09:45 Skurmedel says:

      The worst part was how bloody slow it was, even on a good connection loading the community stuff took ages.

    • 24/02/2010 at 11:59 Andy says:

      This doesn’t mean it’ll use Firefox instead though (if you’ve got that set as you’re default browser). Web-Kit is the tech behind Safari and Chrome browsers but this makes it sound as though Valve have made their own purpose built stuff for it.

  54. 24/02/2010 at 05:47 drewski says:

    It’s bricked my Steam installation as well – can’t find a particular file (“bin/vgui2.dll”), and Valve’s only recommended fixes are how to correctly move a Steam installation (which I haven’t done) and to clear the ClientRegistry.blob, which I’ve done, which makes no difference.

    And the -clearbeta tag doesn’t work.

    I might try reinstalling.

    • 24/02/2010 at 19:11 DrazharLn says:

      If you do reinstall, before you do that, move your steamapps folder somewhere else or it’ll get deleted and with it all your games.

  55. 24/02/2010 at 05:49 coupsan says:

    I’m not digging it. Too much superficiality: the giant buttons are unnecessary and so are the little design touches like the diagonal lines that’s used as a design choice for seemingly everything Web 2.0. Steam needed an update, but not this.

    • 24/02/2010 at 12:58 Jeeva says:

      Semi-agree. Something about it just seems a bit too much “Whoo look at our pretty curves”.
      I feel terrible, normally I argue (to friends) that “you should use all that memory you have”, but I just liked the minimalist old Steam. :)

      This is cool, don’t get me wrong. It just hasn’t clicked for me yet.

  56. 24/02/2010 at 05:58 Zyzzi says:

    They said they’d fix that very soon

  57. 24/02/2010 at 06:47 Lemon scented apocalypse says:

    Cue thousends of people whining about change. Oh wait…..

    • 25/02/2010 at 12:14 Kadayi says:

      Yeah change is bad, never change anything ever. It was always better in the old days, what with the Black plague, Slavery and subjugation of women you knew where you were. The new, you just can’t trust it can you. Before you know it, it will probably change again, that’s how fickle the new is. War never changes, so why should we.

      :arms:

  58. 24/02/2010 at 06:57 Nick says:

    I’ll like it better without all the giant buttons/icons and the ability to resize the main window more than it currently allows – overall its mostly great though, I’ll stick with non beta till its ready however.

  59. 24/02/2010 at 07:20 Vague-rant says:

    Cannot connect to steam network apparently… Too much demand for the beta?

    In any case, looking forward to this. As I’ve no doubt other people have said, Steam really did need an update.

  60. 24/02/2010 at 07:25 MinisterofDOOM says:

    I like the direction this move takes the interface, it just needs refinement. Fortunately, that’s exactly what betas are for. I’d really like to see some more space-efficient My Games views. And the categories would be much more useful if it were possible to display more than one at a time. As they stand it just adds complexity without any real benefit, which is disappointing.

  61. 24/02/2010 at 08:09 UK_John says:

    Lot’s more numbers that don’t mean a thing – when are we going to see sales numbers, income and expenditure and profit numbers?!! The more we get everything but, the more I am suspicious about Steam. Take way all the people that HAVE to be registered to Steam, for Empire Total War, Dragon Age, any Valve titles, and many others titles that force a connection with Steam to be able to play the game, and I don’t think these numbers mean anything at all.

    I believe the reason sales aren’t given and NPD doesn’t use these services in it’s numbers (outside of them giving no numbers for NPD to use!) is the fact that NPD know the number of sales of latest titles at companies like Steam, D2D and Impulse and know they are sill very low. EA have announced, for example, they did just over $500 million in on line sales and 2.5 Billion in retail. That must tell people something….!

    • 24/02/2010 at 08:10 Vinraith says:

      Dragon Age doesn’t require Steam.

    • 24/02/2010 at 09:06 drewski says:

      Yes – it tells people that for mainstream games, the digital market is approximately 17%. Which is pretty substantial when you’re talking about a $15 billion industry.

    • 24/02/2010 at 09:09 MadTinkerer says:

      “EA have announced, for example, they did just over $500 million in on line sales and 2.5 Billion in retail. That must tell people something….!”

      See last week’s ENN and various serious news stories about how EA is actually doing. Laying off thousands (!) of employees and shutting down servers for games less than a year old tells me a lot more than sales figures.

      Meanwhile if you actually used Steam, you’d know how awesome it is.

    • 24/02/2010 at 09:12 MadTinkerer says:

      Oh also: if you want to say you trust EA more than Valve, I have just four words for you:

      Origin Systems and Bullfrog.

    • 24/02/2010 at 09:13 Jamesworkshop says:

      NPD doesn’t use digital sales for the same reason they don’t track sales outside of North America they are a retail tracking firm in North America

    • 25/02/2010 at 12:21 Kadayi says:

      @MadTinkerer

      You do know that they’ve had a new CEO since those days yes? Someone whose taken the company in a completely different direction?

      As for the layoffs, you do realise that there’s a global recession on yes? Pretty much everyones having to shed labour, and cut down on unprofitable ventures at the moment.

  62. 24/02/2010 at 08:13 Davee says:

    Looks fairly good to me. Games list Isn’t what I hoped for though. But I won’t be using it yet – seeing as how all the drop-down menus are broken for me (no text at all).

  63. 24/02/2010 at 08:31 The Dark One says:

    It’s nice that you can create custom categories for your games library, but I wish they’d left the collapsible bits for the Show All Games option. I hope they tamp down on the gradients, too- they turn the chat windows into these weird blobs.

    The most surprising thing, though, are the positive comments I’ve seen about the steam beta’s performance. Just mousing over my friends’ icons in the Library’s Detail view chews up a bunch of my cpu (a c2d e6750, which shouldn’t have any trouble with html). Scrolling through my Friends list or dragging its window to a different part of my screen raises my CPU utilization up to 40% and still manages to be feel stilted and laggy. I thought WebKit was supposed to be better than Trident.

  64. 24/02/2010 at 08:42 Lambchops says:

    I care little for this as my complete lack of Steam friends will become more apparant! Who needs community, right?

  65. 24/02/2010 at 08:50 Mac says:

    I like it – just installed and it’s amazing how much quickly things load. Very nice update.

  66. 24/02/2010 at 09:01 MadTinkerer says:

    I am very, very happy with it, except:

    I was merrily sorting out my 300(!) little icons into their various custom categories (40-ish Popcap games, 50-ish Mods, 30-ish Indie games, every Valve game, 40-ish non-Valve FPSs, etc.) when Steam crashed. When I loaded it up again, everything I had just done had been wiped.

    And then I couldn’t remember my Steam Forum password to complain about it.

    So if you’re doing a lot of organizing, don’t forget to close and open Steam again every so often just in case.

  67. 24/02/2010 at 09:12 Morte says:

    Hugely impressed with this so far, way overdue.

    Best bit: no IE
    Almost as good: Improved downloader

    But it’s all good. Not sure about games list yet, if I can categorize my undreds of games then that’ll win too.

    One bug so far for me, a purchase didnt show in library until I restarted steam, causing brief moment of panic.

  68. 24/02/2010 at 09:34 mbp says:

    How is the loading time? Perhaps my biggest gripe with the current version of Steam is that is seems to take longer to load (including the obligatory delay while you wait for Steam to patch itself) than any game I play through it.

    Am I the only one who on seeing the title half expected to read that Valve are pulling out of PC gaming to concentrate on consoles. Perhaps I am paranoid but if any more companies desert PC gaming this blog is going to have be renamed “Rock Paper, Shotgun: Single button browser gaming since 2010″

  69. 24/02/2010 at 10:00 terry says:

    I am liking the ability to apply arbitrary tags to my games, now I can finally have my “Mediocre Eastern European FPSs” and “Mistranslated Shovelware Garbage” and “Regretful Impulse Buys” lists :-)

    However, I’m not ready to contend with games redownloading so I’ll be steering clear until the initial hiccups are sorted. Looks neat, though!

  70. 24/02/2010 at 10:06 LST4R says:

    Progressivism! Progress is the disease!

  71. 24/02/2010 at 10:07 TheInsider says:

    This is the second time i get half year old news from this page!

  72. 24/02/2010 at 10:30 KillahMate says:

    Now it’s using WebKit-based rendering magic, which should hopefully speed everything up a deal.

    YES OH GOD YES JESUS CHRIST I’M SO HAPPY RIGHT NOW THERE ARE STARS IN MY EYES

  73. 24/02/2010 at 10:32 oceanclub says:

    Great that they now have categories, but unfortunately these aren’t stored centrally – so if you use Steam in multiple locations, you have to set up your categories seperately. Boo. ;(

    P.

  74. 24/02/2010 at 10:32 KillahMate says:

    But seriously, this is superawesome. It’s like they pulled the complaint list from my brain and went through it point by point. Plus some extra stuff.

  75. 24/02/2010 at 10:45 Alexander Norris says:

    I don’t like it, and won’t like it until it lets me have the collapsed games window again. I don’t want to be stuck with a browser-sized thing on my desktop and have to scroll down for half an hour to find the one game I want to install or play. It’s an IM client that lets me launch games, so it should behave like one and be small and uninstrusive.

    That said, it looks pretty and no more IE is a good thing.

  76. 24/02/2010 at 11:02 destroy.all.monsters says:

    Everything other than LIBRARY gives me an error. Also – why in hell do you need 3 different logins for Steam? It’s ridiculous that I need 1 for support, 1 for forums and 1 real account.

    • 24/02/2010 at 19:30 jsutcliffe says:

      Security, at least in terms of keeping your Steam application account separate. I’m not sure why you can’t combine a forum account and a support account, but I suspect it comes down to security again.

  77. 24/02/2010 at 11:07 Laco says:

    Huh. I just noticed achievements for Half-Life 2 and Episode 1 (listed under ‘Locked’) on their Games Library pages. They don’t have descriptions yet, but does this signify an update in the near future?

  78. 24/02/2010 at 11:08 battles_atlas says:

    Would recommend not touching this yet – for me it wiped my install of MW2 are started re-downloading it. The forum is full of stories of similar experiences with several games

    • 24/02/2010 at 16:52 suibhne says:

      Same here, except that it only lost half of my MW2 MP client – about 6GB out of 11GB. Totally freakin’ bizarre. Whiskey tango foxtrot? (Danger Close! Oscar Mike!)

  79. 24/02/2010 at 11:38 Tunips says:

    It is worth noting that for some people (me and everyone I know), installing this update deletes the multiplayer half of MW2. This is not a great new feature (Or is it??)

  80. 24/02/2010 at 11:42 Doctor Doc says:

    Steam dies immediately for me. Here’s how to opt out

    Shut down Steam (if it haunt crashed already). Run regedit.exe and go to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Valve\Steam\Beta”. Now delete everything inside and start Steam again.

    Still doesn’t work? Delete the ClientRegistry.blob file in the Steam directory as well, that solves 95% of all Steam problems. Steam will forget your password after doing this.

  81. 24/02/2010 at 12:08 roryok says:

    seems like they focussed on UI updates instead of fixing some of the core issues. Its still buggy in XP, even moreso now (try moving the window around the screen) and there’s STILL no way to limit your bandwidth usage. Every time I go to install or update a game it either takes all or nothing. No way to tell it to only take say 200k

  82. 24/02/2010 at 12:31 john says:

    diagonal lines, glow effects and gradients? The theme looks like it was knocked up in photoshop for some budget website. Like the structural changes, but the old theme had a great timeless look, while this will date quickly.

  83. 24/02/2010 at 12:52 Spaceghost says:

    Deleted TF2 and Modern Warfare 2 and now its crashing out

    FML x 100

  84. 24/02/2010 at 13:22 TRS-80 says:

    I’m glad that IE is gone, but the new interface seems even more laggy than the old one.

  85. 24/02/2010 at 13:43 MeestaNob! says:

    They make you have multiple logins so if one is compromised the others are not.

  86. 24/02/2010 at 13:56 bill says:

    But I don’t have any friends! I just want a little list of games to launch… :-(

  87. 24/02/2010 at 15:33 Shalrath says:

    “I believe the reason sales aren’t given and NPD doesn’t use these services in it’s numbers (outside of them giving no numbers for NPD to use!) is the fact that NPD know the number of sales of latest titles at companies like Steam, D2D and Impulse and know they are sill very low.”

    NPD also doesn’t track Walmarts sales in the States so… yeah, how useful are those numbers really? They track the numbers people release – and as far as I know, no-one releases online numbers. I DO know that Sony is humiliated by the PSN download numbers, as I worked on a game that had one of the highest download amounts ever – and it was loooow. We’re talking really, really sadly low.

  88. 24/02/2010 at 16:04 Durns says:

    @UK – John

    Until they become publicly listed, you will never see full figures. Why? Because they don’t have to as a private company. And if you don’t have to release information as a business, you don’t.

    • 24/02/2010 at 17:56 UK_John says:

      Name one private or public company that is having great sales numbers that are going up all the time, (which many PC gamers believe and will shout about despite never having seen STEAM sales numbers!) that keeps quite about it? The reason STEAM gives every number possible to make them look good but never give out sales numbers, is the latter is a lot lower than gamers perceive. If they wanted to be ‘private’ why give out any numbers at all? But the fact they give out ever number they can EXCEPT sales numbers surely says something!

    • 24/02/2010 at 20:25 Kirkburn says:

      Yes, that the sales numbers are not theirs to give out – something they have already stated.

  89. 24/02/2010 at 16:30 Dave says:

    The interface is very Zune-like: pretty, but some of the list interface stuff isn’t as intuitive as it should be.

  90. 24/02/2010 at 17:43 Azhrarn says:

    Nice new UI, although at the moment my Store Window seems to have bricked itself, other than that it works very nicely indeed.

  91. 24/02/2010 at 19:15 Garreett says:

    See: TF2 on consoles. If I recall correctly, they haven’t even had an update in months.

  92. 24/02/2010 at 19:17 Garreett says:

    ahem, reply-button fail. My post was in reply to Terry’s “Given the runaway success of the console ports of Valve games, I wouldn’t worry.”

  93. 24/02/2010 at 21:28 Blather Blob says:

    Store, Library, News, Community… what about Games? I don’t like seeing the actual games relegated to a mere second-layer sub-category of the client’s “Library”. It makes me worry about them forgetting the main point of Steam amongst the community and social 2.0ing.

    But I do like the redesign otherwise. Have you noticed that in Details view the background picture is tinted to match the header color, and that color changes from viewing to viewing? Sure there’s some rough edges, but it’s a beta and Valve know how to listen to the community, focus groups, and their datamining better than anyone.

  94. 25/02/2010 at 07:12 Ace says:

    Where is the compact mode? I hate anything that isn’t compact mode… :[

  95. 25/02/2010 at 09:05 pimorte says:

    @kirkburn

    But Valve won’t let people release their own Steam sales figures either.

  96. 25/02/2010 at 13:13 Kadayi says:

    I’m liking the fact that it tells you the number of steam users presently online. Right now seems to be around 1.5 million which give it’s 1ish in the afternoon mid week in Europe and between 5 and 8 in the morning US time is still quite a large number of users for this time of day. Interested to see how the evening figures go.

    Who was claiming that PC gaming was dead btw?

  97. 26/02/2010 at 13:34 pimorte says:

    @Kadayi – Jonathan Blow and the Audiosurf guy have mentioned about how they are blocked from talking about their sales figures.

    You can figure out some, though.
    Trials 2 SE only sold about 4000 copies. Since True Fan only has 12 recipients http://www.redlynxtrials.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=4670&sid=bf38730a1da69a215b4c8061f894267d and is sitting on 0.3% of the total playerbase, you can work it out from there.

    • 27/02/2010 at 02:47 Kadayi says:

      @pimorte

      Can you come up with some quotes on that?

      Also 4000 seems a little low. Trials gets a lot of positive talk (though admittedly it’s not my cup of tea).

  98. 26/02/2010 at 13:46 Gareth says:

    Beyond slowing my FPS to a crawl in old HL1 engine games if the main Steam window was still open, had a really good time with the new interface so far… I have been very lucky though, and not had any of the bugs, like friends list disappearing or game cache being redownloaded.

  99. 27/02/2010 at 02:59 Gareth says:

    I’ve got ten people on my friends list alone that own it on Steam, plus myself. I don’t believe those numbers at all, to be honest. Sure, it’s a small sample, but amongst my friends it’s not the kind of game I’d imagine selling.
    I think the several fire-sales for T2:SE probably gave it a massive shot of numbers over a mere 4,000.

  100. 27/02/2010 at 03:56 pimorte says:

    @Kadayi

    http://braid-game.com/news/?p=609#comment-6917 (though that’s admittedly a little vague)
    and I can’t hope to find the other one again, it was in an RPS feature about a conference talk that the Audiosurf guy was giving.

    I was quite surprised at the figures for Trials too, but the math is fine.

    • 27/02/2010 at 11:59 Kadayi says:

      @pimorte

      I expect with Blow it’s probably sensible to keep your sales figures to yourself given if you give the impression you’re rolling in it people might be disinclined to carry on lining your pockets. Indie games that make it big can be extremely profitable given the low overheads and staff numbers.

  101. 05/05/2010 at 10:49 Uglygargoyle says:

    None of the text shows on my buttons , tool tips or pretty much anywhere. I have unistalled and reinstalled but no joy. Has anyone else had or pref fixed this???

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