Valve Just Gave the Steam Store a Makeover — And It's a Total Disaster

Valve just gave the Steam store a facelift. First impression: slicker, wider, a little more modern. That bright, colorful Slime Rancher 2 1.0 banner doesn’t hurt either. Second impression: oh no, panels. Lots of panels.

The top bar got a makeover, and panels took over

The main store bar now features Browse, Recommendations, Categories, Hardware, Ways to Play, and More, plus the search bar and your wishlist up top. Click basically anything and a big panel flies out, shoving a simple text list to the far right. Widening the store is a good call. Turning everything into chunky tiles like it’s still the Windows 8 era? Less so.

What actually changed (and why it feels a little odd)

• Browse: You get a pink Top Sellers panel and a green Discounts & Events panel, with smaller, duller tiles for New Releases, Your Wishlist, Free To Play, and Demos. It looks tidy, but it’s hiding or burying entries that used to sit right under New & Noteworthy in clean, readable text you could mouse over. Also, when the panel pops out, it mutes the rest of the page and somehow shows the same or less info than the old, smaller interface.
• Recommendations: This one feels redundant. Steam still has that big Featured & Recommended marquee on the main store scroll. Click the new tab and you get three algorithm-picked games and a giant tile for Your Discovery Queue. The queue is also in the main scroll. Bonus weirdness: the three games in the tab didn’t match the scroll’s picks for me, and refreshing changed them again.
• Categories: The old view gave you a big, readable blast of genres and themes in one spot: Action, RPG, action RPG, JRPG, roguelike, turn-based, shmup, platformer, anime, horror, open-world, and so on. Now the tab shows six tiles pulled from Your top genres. Mine were: action role-playing, looter shooter, third-person shooter, futuristic, city builder, and loot. I barely touch city builders, I have no idea what futuristic is supposed to mean here, and having both looter shooter and loot is… not helpful. The loot label even surfaced stuff like Monster Hunter Stories and Raid Shadow Legends. Under that, there’s a horizontal tag strip doing its best, but the design funnels you toward View all buttons parked on the right. Before, you could just see everything at once.
• Hardware: Two tiles. Steam Deck and the Steam Deck dock. That’s it, while Valve keeps cooking whatever’s next in the lab.
• Ways to Play: It’s there in the bar, but nothing headline-worthy to call out from this pass.
• More: Arguably the messiest panel. It breaks the spacing and formatting rhythm the other tabs use and slaps on two extra text lists with mismatched centering. Feels like a leftover.

Nice paint job, clunkier commute

I pulled up an archived version of the pre-update store just to sanity-check myself. Aesthetically, this redesign is cleaner and a little mobile-y in a good way. Functionally, it adds steps to reach stuff that used to be one hover away, and the big panels keep taking over the screen to show less information than the old text-first menus. It’s as if Valve signed a panel quota and had to meet it.

Pretty at a glance, slower once you start poking around.

It’s not awful or unusable, and plenty of people will like the new layout. I’ll probably get used to it too. Today, though, my muscle memory is screaming, and the UX gremlins are winning.

Meanwhile, in wild Steam stats

Someone just set a platform milestone: an account valued at over $250,000 became the first to own 40,000 games on Steam. They also have more than 26,000 games still sitting on their wishlist, which they will surely play any day now.