Steam UI overhaul incoming, Valve presentation confirms

An overhaul of Steam's UI is in the works and will focus on changes to the library and game launch pages, according to a Valve presentation at the recent conference Indigo 2017.

The slides from Valve's product designer Alden Kroll, posted on the ValveTime forum, say that there's an "overall UI refresh and update coming", but give no date for the changes. Specifically, Valve plans to add the option to quickly launch recently played games from the library home page. That'd be welcome – if you've got a large collection and you're juggling 3 or 4 games, it's a (very minor) pain to have to keep scrolling between them.

The tweaks will also highlight games in your library that currently have some activity, whether than be events, updates, or simply titles your friends are playing.

Valve also promised a new "rich display of content" on game launch pages. The company says the reworked pages will better highlight your friends' activity in that game and flag community screenshots, artwork, and guides.

Here are the relevant slides:

The news does seem to back up images that were discovered in a Steam Client beta version released in February, as noted by SteamDB. They showed a streamlined library with a 'recent items' section and a game launch page that gave links to current streams of that particular title. Clearly it's something Valve have worked on in the past – whether the final result resembles these pictures or not remains to be seen.

I mean, the new slides are not much to go on, but all the changes do seem reasonable and the UI is definitely due a refresh. Is there anything you'd like to see overhauled in Steam's UI?

Hat tip to cheery RPS fanzine PCGamer for flagging the presentation up.