Steam has increased the width of its product pages from 940 pixels to 1,200 pixels. It’s a change that would go unremarked on for most other online stores, but this is Steam, the place we’ve been buying PC games since the 2000s, and Valve, a company from which we’ve come to expect things like 750-word blog posts about page width. (Even though it will also kick off public testing of a whole new videogame without acknowledging its existence.)
The great Steam enwidening came to the Steam beta client in August (you can opt into beta updates in the “Interface” tab of the Steam settings), and has now rolled out to everyone. As one effect, the screenshots on Steam store pages can now be displayed at a higher resolution, and there are new theater and full-screen browsing modes for images and trailers.
The wider product pages also come with new formatting options for game publishers, and they aren’t the only part of Steam that’s had a nice stretch: Search results, bundle pages, the Steam Charts, and a few other Steam pages have also become roomier.
Valve also plans to widen the front page of the Steam store down the line: “We’ve got some similar adjustments coming in the near future for the homepage, but they aren’t quite ready yet. Stay tuned.”
Why 1,200 pixels and not some other number?
“We know many of you have 4k monitors with lots of pixels to spare (we can tell from the Steam Hardware Survey),” says Valve. “Our research shows that most players don’t run the Steam client or web browsers full screen. While we experimented with different proportions, we found that 1,200 pixels wide felt like a good balance where we can show more content on screen without overwhelming the page and making it hard to navigate.”
To be sure that the wider pages still worked in smaller browser windows or on devices with small screens, Valve says it tested them on “a tiny old iPod that someone had laying around.” The result? “It mostly works, but things get pretty small.”
Mostly, eh? Sounds like more work needs to be done to support browsing Steam on an iPod, but I suppose I can let it slide for now.
(If you’re wondering where the very wide Geralt image at the top of this article came from, a modder called Votislav extracted it from The Witcher 3 in 2018 and included it on the page for their “Finger Lickin’ Geraldo” mod. We were quite smitten by it and call it Big Geralt.)
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