Valve has made an open beta available for an upcoming Steam update that brings ‘Creator Homepages‘ to the platform. These homepages will replace the generic lists of games when clicking on links to publishers and developers, and they look much shinier.
Right now, when you click on the name of a developer or publisher on Steam, it brings you to a page almost identical to the one you see when looking at search results. When the update comes, you’ll instead be brought to that publisher’s or developer’s creator homepage. Some have already opted to make use of the new feature, like Paradox Interactive and 2K games. But because the page needs to be manually set up by the developer or publisher, not all of them will look as good yet.
Creator homepages will have different tabs for upcoming games, current releases, what sales are on, and so on. Games will also be able to be split into different franchises and genres, with the best-selling games highlighted. As a Steam user, you can also filter out DLC, individual games, and demos when visiting a creator homepage. Much like the Steam Curators system, you can also follow your favourite publishers and developers, with notifications of when new games or DLC are released.
Valve aren’t only bringing creator homepages into the modern era, and have also been working on overhauling the Steam chat system to better resemble a service like Discord. It’s in open beta too, and using it you can create persistent group chats with their own avatars and custom names, format text, and of course, send your friends your favourite GIFs and videos. You can try this beta out either in your web browser or in the Steam client by going to their chat update URL. This Steam update, as well as the creator homepage update, will be coming out of beta and into Steam proper soon.
