Steam has been around a long time. The players numbering in the millions on the platform have seen it go through many iterations over the years. With the incoming launch of the Steam Deck, the company is putting a lot of effort into refining the store experience. One of the biggest problems with the current Steam store is that there’s so much going on.
As a new post on the Steam site states, the new Store Hubs will help with this. The store hub is basically a way for the intro page to Steam to be better suited to each player. By making the recommendation engine more focused on learning about each user, that section will be more optimized. By combining the Hubs with the existing filter features, gamers should be able to better find games they will actually be interested in.
Other planned additions for the sake of Steam Deck are pretty clear. The SteamOS that will run on the device has already been stripped down by 10 GB in size. We can safely bet that more updates are coming in the future.
Valve has been trying to improve the overall store experience for some time. Store experiences have been smoothed out with better wishlist functions, recommendations for new games, and more. Even the classic sales have been refined, what with the removal of flash sales. Players will notice that the search refinements are a big focus. The sheer volume of games on Steam has been a real problem. Hopefully, Valve makes the Store Hub a feature that better focuses game recommendations.
Valve has introduced the feature as part of their latest Steam Labs series, Experiment #13. The goal with these beta tests is to get feedback from users, as well as load test the setup. It’s not too much of a concern for Steam, given the massive size of the platform, but it’s good to know things are checked before being deployed.
