PC gaming’s premiere launcher Steam has received the biggest overhaul in quite some time. The titular Library Update does exactly that by bringing the client’s library tab into the modern age with fancy new visuals and radical new viewing options. You can read up about the full changes in the official update post by Valve here. But there’s more, as the Remote Play Together is now also officially out of beta and available for everyone. You can read more about the really useful free service that lets you play local multiplayer games across the internet with others here.
If you have even a moderately capable desktop or laptop, you’ll likely have Steam installed on it. The gaming service by Valve has established itself as the place to game on PC, after launching in the early 2000s. Almost every game for PC gets released through Steam, with only a handful of big publishers even daring to withhold the games from being available there. With more than 90 million active users each month, Valve’s game launcher is bigger than even the PlayStation 4’s already-large user base.
As such, every major update to the Steam Client marks a huge event, only comparable to console UI revamps. Valve themselves aren’t really known to rush anything, so the Library Update by them is especially remarkable. The Library is every users’ main panel to search, organize, discover, research and start games. Previously, users were greeted with a spartan arrangement of their gaming library that contains links to their respective community hubs. Customization was very limited for the most part.
The new update adds tons of new options, like the ability to create Collections. These are arbitrary and can be anything you want. Genre, year, etc.. What will make this aspect a whole lot more usable, is the new feature of arranging your library according to a wide range of parameters. These include Metacritic Scores, Game Size among others. Complementing these is the option to list titles by their game tags. So, if you are on a Visual Novel bender or feel like browsing through only Soulslike games, you can now do it.
Apart from these functionality enhancements, the library now also features vertical game banners which can also be animated if you like. Make sure to read Valve’s blog post about the Library Update to learn about all the new features.
