With so many games on Steam and no quality control system to sort through the garbage, finding new games to play can be difficult. To smooth out such rough waters, Valve has been developing a number of tools like Interactive Recommender and Play Next through its new-ish Steam Labs program "experiments. "One of those experiments, which took place in September 2019, was the Steam s basic search functionality was to try to extend it with more filters and features.

That experiment is now fully operational, meaning that Steam's search feature allows users to filter search results by price and/or special offers, include or exclude tags (e.g., survival games but not zombies), already own games or exclude games that have been put on a wish list or ignored. If you are searching in a language other than English, a language filter control will appear near the top of the search page. Also, if you are sick of seeing VR-only results when you don't have a VR headset, you can now choose to exclude VR-only games.

Search results are now displayed even with infinite scrolling. That is, as long as you keep scrolling, the results will continue to load automatically, but if you don't like infinite scrolling (as I do), you can switch to the previous "click to load more" system in the store preferences. [For example, if I want a free single-player indie adventure with Steam achievements and cloud saves in French, I can find one from the pack with very little time or effort. More to the point, if you don't have to look through a crappy title like "Hentai Nazi Hitler Returns," you may not need to do this.

Valve has stated that the rollout of the new enhancements "is not the end of search improvements," and is soliciting user feedback on all ongoing experiments via its Steam Labs page.