The festive season is a time everyone awaits for those juicy deals on games. Many can finally buy the desired games for a lower price than usual. This year has been no exception.
Steam is a digital video game distribution service and an online store owned by Valve Corporation. It hosts several sales throughout the year that offer great deals and discounts on games. Steam summer sale, autumn sale, Halloween sale, etc. are the events gamers look forward to buying games that have been on their wishlist forever. At the end of this year, Steam hosted their Winter Sale 2020, scheduled from 22nd Dec 2020 to 5th of January 2023.
The winter sale has been live for 3 days and is going successfully so far. To make this sale more user friendly and accessible, they have implemented a new feature that makes the search feature more versatile, powerful, and easier to use. This new feature is based as a part of Steam labs which is aimed to implement new features and determines usefulness by gathering feedback.
The new Search functionality is termed as ‘faceted browsing’. This gives the user a wide range of options to narrow down their searches to ones that are desired. The new update offers a few category boxes that are very helpful in your quest for searching.
Table of Contents
1. Narrow by Price and Special Offers
This will narrow your searches based on the availability of special offers and the price of the product according to your budget. The maximum price is ‘Any price’ and the minimum is ‘free’.
2. Include and Exclude tags
Users can include and exclude tags according to their taste. For example, if you are a fan of survival games but don’t want them to include aspects of horror or zombies, you can exclude them by unticking. Also, tags will show an estimated number of results that will return which makes your searches more precise.
3. Hide games you already know
This feature box will allow you to include or exclude the games that are already in your library, wishlist, or are previously stated to be ignored, to pop up. These controls can be enabled and disabled without reloading your search results and this setting is preserved between searches.
4. VR support
It was a little harder to sort games that were VR friendly before. But with this new check box, users can narrow their searches by including or excluding VR only or VR supported results. So if you don’t own a VR Headset, which can be very expensive, the results will not remind you of that sad reality.
5. Infinite Scroll
This feature will allow the results to be below to maintain a continuous motion of scrolling down rather than manually clicking through pages to load new contents. Also, this feature will remember your current position on the search list on clicking any content to load you right back where you left off.
6. Filter by Language
This feature narrows the result by determining their availability by the languages you select. SO if you want to search for games that are available in Spanish, you have to select that on the language box filter. This is very practical in every sense if you ask me.
They have also introduced a new tab called ‘Browse Winter Specials by Genre or Theme’ on the main page. This offers the top choices under selected genres and will also have a subdivision under them. Like, if you select the ‘CO-OP’ genre, you will be directed to a page that supports all the CO-OP games. From them, you can sort the results by selecting Featured, Action, Adventure, etc. Another great way to find exactly what you need.
Steam has been dominating the digital gaming distribution market for a long time and offers a wide range of game libraries with occasional hefty discounts. It is quite pleasing to see certain changes to improve their store based on user reviews. These sales are quite an occasion for gamers who look forward to trying something new. It is also a great time to give your favorite steam friend a game gift that he has wanted for a long time. Happiness for everyone and good gaming sessions guys and gals!
