With today’s Steam update, you’ll now find that many store pages throughout Steam are wider, making better use of your larger monitors and better organizing some of the information on screen.
For users opted into the Steam client beta, these set of changes have been visible since late August while we refined the update and gave game developers a chance to prepare for wider store page assets. Today’s update officially moves these changes out of beta to be fully public, widening many pages from 940 pixels to now 1200 pixels.
If you have been opted into the beta, you’ve already been using the new wider store pages and won’t see much change today. For those of you that haven’t been opted into the Steam client beta, read on for a quick overview of the changes.
The biggest changes can be found on game store pages, where we’ve also recently updated the video player (you can read about that in our post from July: Steam Trailer Player Upgrades).
The trailer and screenshot carousel now supports three different modes (default, theater mode, full-screen mode) with the same functionality. All modes adhere to your preferences for whether to auto-play trailers and whether audio should be on or off by default.
Higher resolution images – Since the page is wider, we can now show off more of the game detail represented in screenshots and trailers.
New modes for even bigger viewing – In the lower-right corner of screenshots, you’ll see two buttons for theater mode and full-screen mode.
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New theater mode – Pop open a view that covers most of your browser or Steam client window and flip through screenshots and trailers.
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New full-screen mode – The same functionality to flip through trailers and screenshots, but in full screen.
We’ve also expanded the tools and options that game developers can make use of when explaining their game and showing off the features that make up their game. On many newer store pages, you’ll see bigger and higher-quality images and more interesting formatting in the “About the Game” section. If you’re curious about the improvement to the tools for game developers, you can read our Steamworks blog post, Beta: Wider store pages; Video support for written game descriptions
You might also notice some subtle updates to the backgrounds of game store pages, allowing a little more of the color and texture of the game artwork to come through and give the store page a little more personality from the game.
Along the way, we also widened a lot of pages across the Steam Store. Here are a few examples:
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Search results are wider and each row is slightly taller giving a little more room for the game artwork to increase in size.
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Bundle detail pages also now have slightly more colorful backgrounds and larger artwork in the list of contents.
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Recommendation pages like the Interactive Recommender and Popular Among Friends are wider.
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Store hubs such as for individual tags (eg. Supernatural) have always been a little wider than game pages. We updated these now to all be the same width.
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Steam Charts and News Hub were both slightly different sizes and even different sets of colors. These have been consolidated some to bring them more inline with Steam platform colors.
You can explore all of the pages that make up the Steam store by visiting the site map.
Q: Why 1200 pixels wide?
A: We know many of you have 4k monitors with lots of pixels to spare (we can tell from the Steam Hardware Survey), our research shows that most players don’t run the Steam client or web browsers full screen. While we experimented with different proportions, we found that 1200 pixels wide felt like a good balance where we can show more content on screen without overwhelming the page and making it hard to navigate.
Q: What about the homepage? It doesn’t look any wider.
A: We’ve got some similar adjustments coming in the near future for the homepage, but they aren’t quite ready yet. Stay tuned.
Q: What happens if my browser or client window is narrower than 1200px?
A: Steam store pages are designed to shrink appropriately to fit well within smaller size monitors, browsers, and Steam client windows. It also adapts in size to fit on tablets, Steam Decks, and mobile devices. We’ve even been testing on a tiny old iPod that someone had laying around (It mostly works, but things get pretty small).
