Every year, thousands of new games get added to Steam and it becomes ever harder for players to discover new titles. With that in mind, the Steam development team decided to experiment with a new way to browse by tweaking the user interface.
Steam creates dozens of experiments under the title os Steam Labs every year and the latest is Steam Labs Experiment 010: Browsing Steam. The main change this brings is to the way types of game are presented to users in the Steam menu. Gone is the basic list of genres, replaced by an extensive list of categories, broken down by Genre and then further into genre subsets.
As Steam explains, "it’s not enough to simply offer good games on Steam—we also need to make sure they’re easy to discover. And to do that, we need to organize them in ways that make sense without being overwhelming." The new organization method takes the form of three new entry points: Genres, Themes, and Player Modes.
Genre covers the kind of game it is (e.g. RPG, platformer, strategy), Themes covers what the game is like (e.g. fantasy, horror, relaxing), and Player Modes covers who the game can be played with (e.g. MMO, multiplayer, co-op, single player). Using these entry points, Steam created 63 new categories broken down into 48 genre, 8 themes, and 7 player modes. You can click on any of them and a dedicated hub of content will be loaded focused on that particular type of game. Within that, there's a further breakdown of the games into:
- New & Trending
- Top Sellers
- What’s Being Played
- Top Rated
- Upcoming
This much more granular approach should make it much easier to delve down into specific types of games and discover new titles that otherwise would have remained hidden. That's the theory anyway, but everyone can try it out and see if they like the new approach. Simply visit the Steam Labs page and click the "Try the Store Navigation Experiment" to experience the new options.