The New Steam Community Beta RSS Feed

Steam Client Update Released - Mar 18

the gish — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 18:46:41 +0000

The last Steam Client Beta build has been promoted to the official release build. You can find the final change log on the Steam news page: http://store.steampowered.com/news/10165/

Thanks to everyone for your feedback, your help with testing, and your bug reports!

New Community Features In Beta

the gish — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 22:15:27 +0000

Today we’re adding three new Community features to the Steam Client Beta; a new Community Home page, the addition of Artwork to hubs, and changes to the main Steam navigation menu. You can help us out by testing them and providing your feedback.

The new Community Home removes the extra step of selecting a hub to view and puts the best content across all game and software hubs in front of you on the front page. No more seeing an interesting image and then having to find it in the hub to learn more about it—now it’s just endless scrolling of the best rated news, screenshots, videos, discussions, ….and artwork.

Speaking of artwork, we’ve added a new tab to all Valve game hubs where anyone can share the game-related art they’ve created. This addition is based on feedback from the community on the need to share more types of images than just screenshots. There’s a ton of great game-related art being created by Steam users that we think has a rightful place on the hubs.

We’re going to test this out with our own games first, then expand it out for other games in the future. To upload artwork, go to the related Game Hub's Artwork tab and look for the "Upload Artwork" button at the top right. We’ve seeded the Valve hubs with some concept and character art. Hope you enjoy it!

The third change is a new drop down navigation in the main Steam nav. With the Community features we’ve added over the last year the Community navigation has become lengthy. We’ve broken out all the links that relate to You from links that relate to the larger Steam Community, improving clarity and giving us more space (enough to bring Groups back!)

These changes are viewable on the web now and will be in the client shortly.

Thanks for your help and your bug reports!

New Guide Home Page

TomB — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 19:25:01 +0000

We just added a new home page for guides that should make it easier to find what you are looking for.

At the top of the page, there's a section that displays the most popular categories and how many guides are in each.

If you've added any guides to your Favorites list, you'll see the latest three guides in a section underneath the category breakdown.

And at the bottom of the page, you'll see the top 10 recent popular guides.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, we'd love to hear it. Head over to the discussions area and let us know what you think: Game Guide Discussions.

And if you've made a guide, please post in this thread.

Ongoing Guide Beta Updates

Alden — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 02:31:05 +0000

It's been just five days since the Steam Guide beta started with members of this group. So far, over a thousand guides have been created, with more being added for games across Steam every day!

We've been getting some great feedback and have been working on adding features and fixing bugs as we discover them. If you have feedback, suggestions, or questions, please make use of the Game Guide Discussions. Also, if you've made a guide, please post in this thread and show us your handiwork.

Here are the additions, fixes, and improvements that we've added over the last couple days:

Added support for bb code tables and guide descriptions
Added more options for alignment and size when inserting images
Languages: Guides can now be tagged with a specific language. Support for filtering by language is coming shortly.
YouTube videos: YouTube videos now only load when they become visible on the page, rather than trying to load all videos at once when the page loads.
Selection indicator in the table of contents (right hand side) now moves to highlight the appropriate section as you scroll down the page
Added yellow beta call-out in the upper-left corner of guide pages

Friday Game Guides Beta Updates

Alden — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 03:30:04 +0000

The beta testing has been going great and we're getting some excellent feedback from folks creating guides. If you have feedback, suggestions, or questions, please make use of the Game Guide Discussions. Also, if you've made a guide, please post in this thread and show us your handiwork.

Here at the Valve offices, we've been hard at work fixing bugs and adding features to make guides more useful and accessible. Here's the changelist from today:

General Additions & Updates

Guides you create from now on will appear in your friends' activity feed
The rating bar now sticks to the top of your browser when scrolling down a guide so you can rate or share the guide wherever you are down the page
Added "Guides" link to right column of profile and friends activity feed to help find the guides you have created or someone else when viewing their profile

Fixes to guide creation

Reducing size of description box. This should be a brief overview rather than the actual contents of your guide.
Fixed description field character limit.
Making youtube video names visible when selecting them to add to your guide.
Fixing encoding to allow for special characters.

Fixes to browsing guide listing

Updated the visuals for guide list
If you are viewing a guide and click on the tags in the right column, they now show guide listing that is properly filtered to that tag
Star ratings now show up on individual items in browse view
Fixed paging when browsing. Now remembers number per page.
Added a title to the browse page

New Steam Community Feature Beta - Game Guides

Alden — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 19:33:24 +0000

You've probably got some favorite games that you play a lot and know pretty well. Or maybe you've mastered playing as a certain class or character in Team Fortress 2 or Call of Duty. Or maybe you're just really good at finding all the hidden secrets in the latest Elder Scrolls game. How do you put that knowledge to use and help fellow gamers? Create a game guide on Steam!

Today we're rolling out Game Guides as a beta to members of the Steam Community Beta. With Game Guides, you can create a guide to help fellow gamers and share your expertise in whatever game you like. To get access to the beta, please join the Steam Community Beta Group.

Creating a Guide:
Once you've joined the beta group noted above, simply go to the Game Hub for any game you play on Steam and look for the "Guides" tab.

Under that tab, you'll find a button to create a guide. You'll be able to upload and insert images or use screenshots that are already in your Steam cloud. You can insert YouTube videos and you can add friends to help you write the guide. When you're done, just publish your guide and it will be accessible to the community.

Feedback? Questions?
We've set up a sub-forum for discussing guides and giving feedback within the Community Beta group here.

Please let us know what you think and if you encounter any bugs.

The new Steam Community is now live for everyone

the gish — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 17:32:47 +0000

The new Steam Community is live as of now!

Thanks to the 440,000 of you who helped test the beta and provided feedback. You’ve been invaluable.

We’ll continue to respond and make changes. Let us know what else you’d like to see as part of the Steam Community.

Beta update - August 30

al — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 22:39:51 +0000

• Added global Steam Discussions area, accessible in the Community sub-navigation
• Added bbcode support for [strike] and [code] ([code] is only available in discussions)
• Fixed a bug where all YouTube™ links were converted to embedded videos, even if the links were not to videos. Now only links to actual videos will be embedded.
• Fixed a bug where screenshot, video, and Workshop item detail page popups were dismissed by pressing any key. Now only pressing ESC or clicking outside the popup will dismiss it.
• Fixed a bug where certain game hubs were not showing up properly after searching for them if they had hyphens in their name.
• Fixed the loading throbber showing up on the Friend Activity page even when there was no more content.
• Fixed a bug where users were unable to favorite screenshots or videos.
• Fixed an issue where the subforum list would change when switching between Game Hub and Workshop discussions for a game
• Added upcoming events to the Friend Activity page.
• Added the short description to a single game purchase on the Friend Activity page if it is available.
• Fixed the animation when posting a new post to a "newest first pagination" comment thread on the Friend Activity page.

Note: there will be a client update shortly to add "Discussions" to the Community nav, in the mean time it is accessible here:
http://steamcommunity.com/discussions/

UPDATE: The Steam Client update has been released. If you aren't seeing the "Discussions" option, you can use "Steam->Check for Steam Client Updates" to make sure you're running the latest version.

Beta update - August 28

al — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 01:05:15 +0000

There's been several updates to the beta yesterday and today, here's a list of some of the changes:

• Changed the order of comment replies to status posts and other friend activity items to be oldest to newest, showing the most recent comments
• Added display of which friends most recently rated up status posts, screenshots, and other items in the friend activity feed
• Changed profile screenshots page to default to newest first order
• Added a grid view option to the screenshots page
• Added an indicator for friends in common when viewing another user's friends list
• When going back from a discussion to the topic list, you'll now be returned to the page of topics you were on.
• Fix for Italian language users having issues posting and replying to forum topics
• Fix problems visiting Game Hubs for some recently released games
• Fix text getting cut off when writing a status in the "Post a status" box
• Removed the 3 character minimum for comments

The Beta is Now Open to Everyone!

TomB — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 23:39:44 +0000

The New Steam Community Beta is now open to everyone. Check out the update page at http://www.steamcommunity.com/communitycontent to learn how to get the new Community now.

We will continue to respond to feedback and already have some changes we hope to ship soon.

We appreciate all the enthusiasm and feedback! Please keep it coming.