Change is good! I think

Image credit: Valve

I know, I know, change is difficult isn’t it? It upset me just the other day that YouTube has changed videos so that they have rounded corners instead of being perfectly rectangular. It’s sacrilegious! A feeling I will continue to have until I ultimately forget about it because life moves on to the next grievance. Still, subtle changes like that can often set some kind of internal alarm bells off, something you might have been experiencing with store pages on Steam looking a bit… wider.

That is because they are, in fact, wider! Valve have said as such somewhere along the line, and the update arrived in the digital storefront yesterday, with a nifty little blog post explaining and showing what the changes actually are. Essentially, store pages for games and the few bits that aren’t games have been widened from 940 pixels to 1200 pixels. Doesn’t sound like much, but seeing it side by side, there’s a surprising amount of space that’s been added.

That’s not the only difference, though. Images that show up in the carousel now have a higher resolution, and there’s a couple new viewing modes to go along with that too; theater mode plasters images and videos across most of the screen, and full-screen mode is exactly what it sounds like. Devs will also have more control over the about sections of their games, again with bigger and higher-quality images, and more flexible formatting. You might also notice that store pages’ background images pop a bit more too, as more colour and texture will come through.

This widening of Steam applies to other aspects of the store too, like search results and recommendation pages, with some general size adjustments for individual tags, charts, and the news hub. Apparently the homepage will be subject to a widening in the “near future too.” Also, you shouldn’t need to worry about pages being too wide if you’re using a narrow browser or client, because Valve even tested it on some old iPod a team member “had laying around.” Classic Valve.