Valve Puts a Redesigned Steam Store Home Into Beta With Richer Recommendations

Why It Matters

r/Games amplified a platform change that is easy to underestimate because it is not a game announcement. Valve has put a refreshed Steam Store Home into beta, and the store home is one of the most important pieces of merchandising real estate in PC gaming. Any change there affects how players discover titles, how publishers compete for attention, and how much context Steam gives before a click.

Valve says the redesign is part of a broader push to improve the Steam store after earlier game page updates. The company’s stated goal is to make it easier to find new games by showing more content and more information, while also making the page feel wider and more responsive on higher-resolution displays. Valve also says those layout changes carry over to Steam Deck and Big Picture mode, which means this is not just a desktop web polish pass.

The refreshed home page is available through the latest Steam Client Beta.

Valve is emphasizing clearer context, not just visual cleanup.

The redesign reaches desktop, Steam Deck, and Big Picture mode.

The home page is being treated as a recommendation and conversion surface.

What Valve Actually Changed

The official announcement is fairly specific. Featured & Recommended now gives more detail about why a game is being recommended and adds a user review round-up. Hovering over a game cover can now trigger a micro-trailer, and Valve says adjacent games in the carousel get a preview as well. That is classic storefront optimization: more reasons to engage, fewer clicks needed to make a quick judgment, and more motion on the page.

Valve also added an explicit option to disable micro-trailer hovers and animated marketing assets in Store Settings for users with motion sensitivity. That matters because the update is not just more aggressive presentation. It also acknowledges that richer discovery surfaces can create accessibility costs if they are not controllable.

Beyond that, Discounts & Events now uses larger game artwork, the Discovery Queue can be browsed more quickly without leaving the page, hover states show short descriptions with better contrast and legibility, and Infinite Scroll has been visually refreshed to match the rest of the page.

What the New Sections Say About Steam’s Direction

The most commercially interesting additions are the new sections. Valve says Store Home can now surface discounted games from your Wishlist and discounted DLC for games already in your library. That is a direct attempt to make Store Home less generic and more behavior-aware, blending discovery with conversion intent.

In practice, this makes the Steam homepage a tighter loop between recommendation, ownership, and discounts. Instead of acting mostly like a billboard, the page becomes more like a personal storefront dashboard. If the beta performs well, the likely result is a Steam front page that feels more personalized, more sales-aware, and more efficient at turning passive browsing into purchases.