Valve has formally introduced new tag, genre, and category pages to Steam in the form of Store Hubs to boost discoverability.
The latest Steam update includes tweaks to Steam’s tag, genre, category, and theme browsing pages to “make it easier for you to find your next favorite game.”
“This update improving the ways you can browse genres, tags, or themes, allowing you to dive deep into each area and narrow down to exactly what you’re looking for,” wrote the company, outlining how its new Store Hubs will work.
“These new pages now make it easy to explore all kinds of different niches within Steam. Whether you are looking for a general category like ‘Multiplayer,’ a theme like ‘Space’ or a very specific tag like ‘Action Roguelike,’ these new hubs let you explore deep into that category.
“For many categories, we’ve hand-built an organization to surface the relevant sub-categories within. For example, the RPG store hub is organized into Action RPGs, Adventure RPGs, JRPGs, and more, so you can drill down to exactly the kind of game you are looking for.”
Valve explained that the contents of each Hub will be personalized based on a user’s play history, friend network, followed developers, and wishlist. It added that the carousel at the top of the each Hub page will show games recommended for individual users, along with “helpful metadata” to explain why that game has been deemed relevant.
An example of a Steam Hub recommendation
“Each hub will recommend games based on what you’ve been playing and the developers you follow on Steam. Of course if you are looking at a category of games that you’ve never played before, Steam may not be able to generate many useful recommendations for you and will hide those sections,” continued Valve.
Steam shoppers will also be able to leverage a list view and filter controls to find exactly what they’re looking for using a feature called Faceted Browsing, which also began life as a Steam Labs experiment.
In order to access a hub, users will need to click on an individual tag from any game’s store page to find the hub for that specific tag. Popular hubs and recommended hubs will also be discoverable from the Steam homepage.
Anybody keen to learn more about Steam’s latest crack at streamlining discoverability should check out the full explainer on the Steam website.