Valve Overhauls Steam Website, Adds Personalized Shopping and DRM Warnings

If you ever have any doubts about the success of PC gaming, look no further than Steam. On any given day, a bunch of different content gets released - from full titles to DLC - and it just never seems to slow down. For proof of that, Valve says that over the course of the past nine months, it's added over 1,300 titles to the service, and Steam as a whole now has over 100,000,000 active accounts.

With such major growth and general success, I've found it odd for a while that Valve wouldn't update Steam's main website. Sure - it's suitable enough, but a fresh coat of paint can help keep things fresh. Last month, the company released an update to Steam that improved its aesthetics somewhat, so it seemed likely that an update to the main website would come also. Well, it has. Whether you'll like it or not is up in the air, though.

This site overhaul doesn't just bring a pretty face, it also brings a couple of new features, such as personalized shopping, and a new feature called "Curator", which allows people to become tastemakers.

To me, the most important update to the site is one of the most subtle: If a title has DRM, a notice is listed on the right-hand side of its page. For Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, for example, Uplay is listed as DRM. Further, it's also mentioned that a EULA will have to be agreed to in order to play. This feature could have been inspired by the popular browser plugin Enhanced Steam, but it's one I consider to be well-worth mimicking.

Overall, some great updates from Valve. I can understand that the design might not be for everyone, but as I'm a total sucker for the color blue, I'm finding myself in heaven.