Steam Library Beta Coming Sept 17th

Looks clean, updated, and great no?
WIeFkGh
It looks the same to me just bigger. But bigger is not better.
 
Looks clean, updated, and great no?

View attachment 187887
WIeFkGh
To me this looks redundant.....You have your list on the left and the tiles on the right......both display the same thing just in different views. One of those lists is pointless.
I do like that they are changing the look though. The tiles remind me of UPlay and Origin.
 
I like the dynamic categories & the full "box" art. Once you minimize the side lists, it works quite well IMHO.
 
I'm hoping this beta is simply missing features that haven't been finished...namely small and especially grid mode.
Grid is the only way to go if you're using Steam as a front-end for non-Steam games. At least if you care about aesthetics. The new look has a bunch of spots for artwork that have to be supplied by the developer. You can edit thumbnails, but they re-size themselves at will. Everything else is just blank for outside games or even older titles that haven't been touched lately.

I reverted to the non-Beta. Not sure if it's related to this release or not, but Steam in general seems slower to open. Choosing the "look for updates" button seems problematic now, too.
 
Only thing I dont like too much is that it mixes my linux and windows games and doesn't give a clear way to differentiate them.

Now granted, proton is pretty amazing at making nearly every game work in linux just like in windows, but still... it would be nice to organize what's installed in windows for my account because it can only be played in windows and what's just not installed currently because i dont want to play it anymore.
 
Looks clean, updated, and great no?

View attachment 187887
WIeFkGh
Looks like a poor version of Big Picture mode. This is what they've been working on for the past 2 years? No, thanks...
Clearly, this appears to be a manual setting because, my games list has not changed its appearance at all but the store front is new. So, how do you change it to this? Thanks.
It's a beta right now. You have to opt-in to it by going to Steam -> Settings. It will be in the Account section.
 
Looks like a poor version of Big Picture mode. This is what they've been working on for the past 2 years? No, thanks...

I don't really understand this either. You can currently get a similar look as the current version of Steam has three different layouts. That is essentially the "Grid" view, with added advertising and social media stuff that shouldn't be in the Library. That section of Steam should just be for games you own.
 
I like having big icons with custom box art. I either download them (loads of people make 'em) or make my own. There isn't really a reason for it beyond giving me a larger item to click and it looking cool. I'm also one of those people that has to have the right album art for all of my music and thumbnails for all of my mkv's.
I suppose that's one reason I like the current Steam layout options. There's a list view, a slightly larger icon view, and the grid view...with a size slider to boot. You can make it look like whatever you want.
I think this new layout is almost like a merger of the list and icon views. Big Picture mirrors a lot what you see in Grid view, but it's a lot busier and kinda clumsy. While they're tweaking things, hopefully they add some of the Big-Picture options to the rest of the UI. It has tons of great tools for customizing control layouts and launch options.
 
I just tired it go up to settings then account and you can download it automatically. Looks pretty nice actually a better way to showcase the games.
 
I tried it out, went back to the old design in 10 seconds. In person it looks like a cluttered mess, which wasn't obvious on screenshots. The small icons on the games list and the choice of font, all makes the list look really disorganized and not natural at all.
And somehow they managed to fit less in more screen area, while not looking cleaner. There are tons of redundant an uneccessary buttons and dividers and unused spaces everywhere.
And when I click on a game the only thing I'm interested in is not visible : workshop content. Instead you get community content enlarged to a huge pixalated mess in center stage.

And the store page which needed the overhaul most didn't change at all. Not that I could tell at least.
 
Related, they released a new non-beta version of Steam that fixes some issues for those of us that tried the beta and went back (slowness, broken updater).
 
Yeah...Tried it a couple days. The biggest issue I had was always the store page. Not touched. The games page just has too much going on now. PLUS could we get a pure black background at some point Valve?
 
...Has the beta had an update in the past month? Just curious if its changed at all for anyone who tried to stick with it.
 
Yeah, I'm also curious if they're continuing to update the beta. Just give me my Grid back and I don't care what else they change.
 
If you click the HELP tab on the right side and click ABOUT STEAM I think the build is udated I'm on the Beta and it says Oct. 19th was the last update.
 
I just ran the remote local play feature last night and the results were mixed. Image quality (broadcast set to max bitrate on a 1gbps fiber connection) and lag were acceptable for the two people located in Canada who were playing on my machine. There were issues with connections getting dropped so it's definitely not perfect. It's still an impressive feature and allowed for hours of dollar free play time of the newly released Trine 4 for the other two players.

It could actually be the ultimate demo feature if a friend has a game you don't have and you want to try out since, as far as I'm aware, it doesn't actually require the game to support co-op in order to invite someone to play on your machine.
 
I absolutely hate that it doesn't automatically go the last played game. In addition to the extra click and lag from all the clutter I'd bet money that the what's new section is going to serving up ads soon.

I'm personally glad that it's closest to detail view since that's what I prefer but they really should still have options. I also find the list on the left to be harder to quickly skim through even though it's clunkier and takes up more space, I think it's mainly because of the mini logos but the font also sucks and seems to have less contrast.

The page for each game is worse but at least halfway decent once the auto load of community content is turned of and the low graphics mode enabled. It still looks a little cluttered while adding nothing useful and dropping the news and updates section which had useful info occasionally, other than that I subjectively dislike the overall design of game pages but do like that they moved the links to things like the store page where they're more accessible.

I really hope they add the option to open to your last played game and there's no excuse for a game client to be laggy on this PC but hey at least it's only a little more ugly and less useful.

Edit: Ok I do really like the manage button, looks like an easy way to set a category.
 
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I absolutely hate that it doesn't automatically go the last played game. In addition to the extra click and lag from all the clutter I'd bet money that the what's new section is going to serving up ads soon.

I'm personally glad that it's closest to detail view since that's what I prefer but they really should still have options. I also find the list on the left to be harder to quickly skim through even though it's clunkier and takes up more space, I think it's mainly because of the mini logos but the font also sucks and seems to have less contrast.

The page for each game is worse but at least halfway decent once the auto load of community content is turned of and the low graphics mode enabled. It still looks a little cluttered while adding nothing useful and dropping the news and updates section which had useful info occasionally, other than that I subjectively dislike the overall design of game pages but do like that they moved the links to things like the store page where they're more accessible.

I really hope they add the option to open to your last played game and there's no excuse for a game client to be laggy on this PC but hey at least it's only a little more ugly and less useful.

Edit: Ok I do really like the manage button, looks like an easy way to set a category.
You can press the little clock face next to the pulldown to sort by recent activity, but it includes recent purchases in addition to the game you've played.
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I'm not sure if I like it yet, myself, but I'll give myself time to play around with it. It does seem like there are easier built-in options to sort and filter your library, though, which I like.
 
Why did they have to take away small mode. That was what I liked most about steam that none of the other launchers had. I dont need giant squares for all my games, just a simple list that I can dock on the side of my screen. I swear every time they do a big update like this it feels like they are taking steps backwards.
 
The new Steam Library is out of beta and in prod. Restart Steam to get the update

bye bye old Steam...hello new Steam!

I like the new look...modern, easy on the eyes...fonts look bigger, colors look more vibrant...the game images look great...I need to tweak the layout later on when I get more time
 
So they still removed small mode?
Goodbye being logged into steam all the time I guess.

Syl: Logged into steam small mode 24/7 from november 16th 2004 till october 31st 2019.
 
Found out you can force small mode on a reboot by adding
"+open steam://open/minigameslist" to your shortcut.

However if you go to big mode, you can't go back unless you restart it.
dumb dumb dumb.
 
Just horrible overall. More shiny pretty over functional. I'd be more tolerant if I could just go back to a list of medium icons with an easy click to the various icon sizes/info screens if I want a change. Oh, and that the loading lag wasn't constant.
 
It's such a mess for anyone who really cares about aesthetics. New box art sizes, tons of missing art from actual purchased Steam games, and very few ways to tweak much of anything. You also still have Big Picture, which uses the older Grid-style game art that doesn't line up with the new sizes. Unless you go in an create a bunch of art assets (3 for each game), it just looks sloppy.

The best I could do was to remove all of the extra shelves, disable the news feed, and set the thumbnails to "small" so my Steam window doesn't involve a shitload of scrolling.

I don't mind what they're trying for here, but getting rid of the older views annoys me. Everything looks and works half-baked until every dev goes back and adds new artwork and Steam views to their games. That's never going to happen.
 
It is a mess. First thing that pops up are friends screen shots and fan art for Ace Combat 7, for Borderlands 2 it is other people's achievements. I don't care about my own, let alone about some stranger. Finding the store page (to check DLC price), update news or more important stuff is shoved way down.

I knew it would be a mess and Valve didn't seem to take the time to redo it. Given their recent history, it looks like we'll be stuck with this for a good 5-7 years.
 
Its garbage, sorry but it is. A neat, clean, simple and minimal UI with advanced sorting options is all that is needed. This graphical garbage has been the trend since vista, its awful to look at.
 
Found out you can force small mode on a reboot by adding
"+open steam://open/minigameslist" to your shortcut.

However if you go to big mode, you can't go back unless you restart it.
dumb dumb dumb.
There is a workaround just make another shortcut that has this:

steam://open/minigameslist

Then even if steam is running you just double click the shortcut and it'll make it go to the small mode anytime.
 
I don't hate it. But I also still dump a games shortcut to desktop, and really go into Steam for installing/Uninstalling and buying games.
 
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