Valve today announced a major update to its popular Steam digital delivery platform, which has grown 200% in the last year and now has 25 million users and over 1,000 games. The new Steam client is being provided in an opt-in public beta to all users who wish to upgrade. An overview of all the new features is available here.
"We made hundreds of changes to the Steam client as a result of customer feedback on the interface, performance, and functionality," said John Cook, Director of Steam Development at Valve. "For example, we swapped out the Internet Explorer rendering engine with WebKit, which gives us a bunch of size, stability and performance benefits. This release of Steam leaves us well prepared for another year of strong growth."
One interesting new feature that publishers will no doubt love is that gamers will now be able to see which games their friends have purchased directly within the Steam storefront, thereby creating "a highly effective and knowledgeable source of purchase suggestions." The new client also "introduces library customization tools to help gamers sort, group, and find games in libraries which for some hardcore players contain hundreds of titles. In addition to having lots of games, gamers needed methods of tracking all of their achievements in a standardized cross-game fashion, which is now possible with the new release."
