It is interesting to note that Steam and the Epic Games Store have followed very different trajectories throughout the holiday season. Meanwhile, long-time reigning champion Valve has rolled out a new Steam Labs experiment called "Faceted Browsing" that gives users more control over what they see in the Steam Winter Sale.

This new feature is like Steam's extensive search feature, but quicker and easier, and only for big sales, which can be overwhelming, frankly. The sale page menu offers a variety of categorized filters, allowing users to find deals more selectively than in the past. For example, if you want an interesting first-person single player RPG, just dial it up. You won't find anything (in my case it showed "N/A"), but if you narrow it down to interesting first-person RPGs, you'll see that both Borderlands 2 and Borderlands The Pre-Sequel are currently on sale: "Borderlands 2" and "Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel" are currently on sale.

Valve has also added "themed pages" to the Winter Sale, ranging from RPGs and shooters to pixel and retro, female protagonists, anime, soundtracks, and software, a catch-all category for anything but games. You can dive directly into the categories.

The theme page was actually added during the Autumn Sale and was a huge success. Valve states, "We found that the themed pages drove more game store page visits than any other discovery point in the Steam store during the sale."

Steam has grown over the years into a huge, unwieldy beast, and during big sale periods it can be a chore to find interesting and relevant games (though generally already well-known games) that are not listed on the front page. The most glaring of Steam's updates, "During the Holidays New Ways to Browse" headline may not be the most hype I've encountered, but I expect it will prove very useful for bargain hunters in the mood for something new.