Valve announces new rules for Steam Game listings

Over the past decade, the Steam platform has evolved into one of the most refined and informative places for PC owners to purchase and play video games. That said, all is not perfect, with one of the more recent annoyances pertaining to the overabundance of game trailers included in Steam listings. Fortunately, Valve has now announced new rules heavily limiting the amount of trailer spam on Steam.

Making the announcement on the Steamworks blog, Valve detailed the changes, saying “The display of trailers on Steam store pages have been updated today to address some frustrations we've heard from players when trying to find gameplay videos or navigate to screenshots. These changes include new logic that determines the order of trailers and screenshots, plus the ability to specify a category for each trailer to show to players.”

The changes include many small-yet-comprehensive tweaks which should make for an overall smoother experience. Perhaps the most affecting change however comes in the fact that moving forward, “a maximum of two trailers can appear in the row of thumbnails to the left of screenshots. Any remaining trailers will be displayed after the screenshots, resulting in a default view for players that always has a mix of screenshots and trailers in view.”

Having trailers available on a game’s store page is vital for allowing players to get a proper look at the game before buying. That said, we have seen many listings feature far too many cinematic and teaser trailers which offer little in the way of concrete information or an accurate representation of the game in question. As such, it is a welcome change to see that navigating Steam from today onwards should hopefully become much less frustrating.

KitGuru says: What do you think of the changes? Did the abundance of trailers bother you? What other small tweaks to Steam would you like to see Valve adopt? Let us know down below.

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