It's been a long time coming, but Valve has finally replaced Steam's old Big Picture mode (blurry visuals and non-functioning tabs) with a new Steam Deck-inspired UI. This was provided as part of the Steam client update (open in new tab) released yesterday, and while it seems to be working quite well in my testing, some users have reported a few issues that have yet to be resolved.

Below are some photos of the new UI, which should be surprisingly familiar to anyone who has messed around with Steam Deck; it's just a standard interface for Valve's handhelds, enlarged to fit the appropriate TV size. Instead of being able to choose from Store, Library, or Community as in previous versions (the first and third crash Steam every time you select them), this mode now puts you directly into a list of recently played games.

On my Xbox One controller, navigation is now done by tapping the glowing Xbox button at the top, which brings up a list of tabs, including Recent, Store, and Library, and I can jump between them. It's a more sophisticated system than the previous one, which showed similar tabs on the left edge of the screen while you browsed games; I expect that non-Xbox gamepad users will be able to use it in the same way.

On my machine (a clunker with a 1080 Ti, 16GB RAM, and a Ryzen 3700x CPU), it worked nearly flawlessly, but at this point it needs user attention. Many Reddit users have reported problems with Steam Big Picture (opens in new tab), including in-home streaming, black screens, high CPU usage, broken controller inputs, and general lag in the UI. Even if the only problem I had was that many of the prompts still referred to Steam Deck instead of "your PC," there is clearly still work to be done.

If you want to spend a little more time with the new Big Picture, there is no need to delay the update. You can still use the old mode by running Steam with the command line option '-oldbigpicture'; Valve plans to remove this option in a future update, but for now there is a safety net.

Still, as someone who used the old Big Picture mode almost daily and had no problems with the new version, I have to say this is a marked improvement. It feels like a bit of a miracle to actually be able to use the store in Big Picture mode after years of spitting out errors, and the whole thing feels much more polished and modern. Shallow as it may seem, the way the new modes jump between screens (all accompanied by Nintendo Switch-like clicks and whistles) just feels better. It's nice to play a game on TV and feel like you're using software created in the last decade.