Valve has added more ways to browse the vast number of games offered through Steam." More detailed game categories have been added based on "New and Noteworthy" drop-down menus and "navigational entry points" built around genres, themes, and player modes.

This new feature was actually introduced in December 2020 as an experimental option for Steam Labs. However, it has now been rolled out to all users in the menu bar at the top of Steam's front page.The New and Noteworthy dropdowns include Top Sellers, New and Trending, Current Specials, Recently Updated, and Popular Upcoming, all in one place.

However, the new categories, divided into Genres, Themes, and Player Support, get really detailed. For example, in role-playing, you can narrow down your choices to action RPG, adventure RPG, JRPG, party-based, roguelike, strategy RPG, and turn-based. If strategy is your preference, there are new subcategories such as Card & Board, City & Settlement, Grand & 4X, Military, Real-time Strategy, Tower Defense, and Turn-based Strategy. Once you have selected a category, you can use tags to further narrow down your choices.

Themes are more broadly based on Steam's selection, including Adult Only, Anime, Horror, Pixel and Retro, and player support is more mechanical, offering options to browse co-op games, LAN, MMO, and single player, for example. Valve states that each of the three "entry points" is modeled after the common ways people browse Steam.

"These player motivations can be organized and represented using Steam tags and metadata," the new blog post states." Categories grouped into Genres and Themes entry points are defined by tags, while categories grouped into Player Modes are defined by additional metadata provided by the developer.

"We arrived at these three top-level categories through a mix of formal research, intuition, and beta feedback. There is also a strong precedent for this scheme within Steam itself in the form of the Steam Curator. We noticed that many curators create lists of specific types of games, almost all of which fall into one of the three patterns described above: lists based on gameplay or genre, such as "City Builders"; lists based on "Games with Dogs or theme-based lists such as "Games to Play With Your Significant Other," or player mode-based lists such as "Games to Play With Your Significant Other.

Each of these views also has its own content hub, including "New & Trending Strategy Card & Board Games," "Top Selling Single Player Adventure Role Playing Games," "Top Selling Story-Rich Sci-Fi & Cyberpunk Games" and more. Each hub also has tabs for "New & Trending," "Top Sellers," "Now Playing," "Top Rated," and "Coming Soon," as well as a standard genre tab for further filtering.

"Clicking on any of these will take you to a subview of the content hub. In the figure above, we see "Building & Automation Sims," but only those containing the "Space Sim" tag. Each of these subviews also has its own unique URL," Valve explains. Viewers can return to the parent category at any time by switching to the filtering tag they previously clicked on, or by clicking on a different tag to view another subview of the category."

I know this is meant to simplify the browsing process on Steam and make the vast selection of content more accessible; I feel like I'm reading a Microsoft Excel manual, and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with it.

Anyway, Steam's new, incredibly detailed and somewhat confusing browsing system is now up and running. Give it a try!