New Steam Update Makes Big Quality of Life Improvement
Valve releases a new client update for Steam, making a useful new UI adjustment.
Valve has released a new client update for Steam, adding a highly requested quality-of-life improvement to the platform’s download and install UI. Prior to the January 22 Steam update, the interface shown to users when downloading an update for a game combined the download and install progress bars, making it incredibly confusing for users. These two bars have now been separated, allowing users to see exactly what stage the download is at.
Although Steam continues to face stiff competition from other digital storefronts, with the Epic Games Store regularly giving away free games to entice users to the platform, there’s no denying that Valve’s platform remains the most popular for PC gamers. The storefront was first launched in 2003 as a way for Valve to provide game updates for titles such as Half-Life. As time went on, Steam evolved into one of the biggest digital storefronts in gaming. The platform even set a new record back in July 2024 when it broke its own concurrent player count record with almost 37 million active users.
Steam Update Makes UI Improvement
With many of the best games available on Steam, Valve continually updates the platform with new features and improvements to ensure that users remain satisfied. The latest improvement was released on January 22 (and spotted by The Verge’s Tom Warren) and makes a small but useful change to the download UI. Once updated, Steam users will notice that when they go to download a new game or update, there will now be two progress bars. The first will be blue and represents the total amount of data downloaded. The second bar, which will be green, shows the installation progress. Download speeds will vary depending on the user’s internet connection, while the installation speed is often down to the read/write speed of the hard drive or solid state drive.
This is just one of the many handy new improvements made to Steam thanks to a new update. The last time Valve rolled out a new feature was back in August when it updated the storefront with a new “Trending Free” tab, which allowed users to separate free-to-play games and demos from paid games that are also new and trending. The update was praised by many and is just the latest in a long line of improvements made by Valve since Steam’s release.
The addition of a new installation progress bar isn’t likely to break the internet, but it is a small quality-of-life improvement that adds to the bigger picture. The combination of both download and installation often led to users becoming confused about why game updates were so large or taking so long to download. The new Steam feature should make it much clearer about what stage an update or download is currently in.
