Steam really could do with a new UI

Sometimes we put up with things that are just a bit old fashioned and primitive when we really should move on to something a bit more interesting and modern, it’s a fact of life. Often we are locked in by a closed platform and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Take Steam. The main Steam UI is pretty useless when you come to think about it. It’s primitive in many places, although it does do the basics of what needs to be done it never quite goes far enough.

I’m going to ignore some of the annoying parts of Steam here, such as the way it ignores what shift+tab does in Windows, the rules for having a flashing caret in Windows and the fact that it can’t keep up with using the virtual view of the file system that Windows has had for nearly 20 years. You shouldn’t have to dig for the Documents or Desktop folder in this day and age!

The Steam Library page is where it’s most annoying as this really does start to get very cluttered very quickly, what with it being a very simplistic list of games. At the top I have 1.. 2.. 3.. Kick it! And at the bottom I have the XCOM: Enemy Unknown and in the middle I have a rather modest (compared to many) list of two hundred odd games from every genre imaginable.

Finding games to play is a nightmare, especially after a sale.

Steam knows much more about these games than we do just from looking at a list of names. It knows the release order of a series of games that is just <game name>:<subtitle> when all I know is that I just grabbed the bundle because it was cheap and I wanted to play the latest game. It knows what genre games are. It knows what games are part of a franchise. It should know what games I’ve never played.

There are some things you can do with the game list. You can pin games as favourites and you can add categories, which just adds them to a section of the list. You can make a category for Assassin’s Creed for instance and add all the games, which helps, but it’s all rather manual.

What I’d like to see is some better support for large libraries with better search and discovery tools. Even being able to auto-sort the list by the most recently purchased or total time played would be nice and that’s information is already displayed elsewhere on the Steam UI. Being able to collapse the list automatically so that a game and its sequels went into subfolders would be good, as would being able to filter just the RTS or RPG games. Sometimes I’d just like a list of all the space 4X games I have. It’s a lot and I don’t always think about the ones I may have grabbed during a sale and not played yet.

Steam is clunky and could do with a new UI.