Steam Labs’ latest experiment has dropped – and it’s going to make keeping track of all the news, updates, and events for your favourite games on the platform a lot easier. Hopefully it won’t make your best and most beloved source of PC games news PCGamesN obsolete, though. Gulp.
Valve’s announced experiment number nine on the Steam Labs site as a way to: “Discover all of the cool events, news, and activities happening in your games in one place.” It’s called the News Hub, and it basically brings all of the “updates, announcements, and events from the games you play and games you are interested in” into a single, personalised feed for you to browse.
Plus, it seems the hub will help you stay ahead of the curve by giving you reminders and prompts by email or mobile to let you know an event’s begun, so you can dive straight in as it goes live. You take a look at the experiment and have a play with the different options right here.
The Steam News Hub’s features include being able to highlight live events as it positions them “front-and-centre”. That’s the case “whether [it] is a live stream with the developer, a bonus points weekend in your favourite free-to-play, or new content that has just been added to your game”, Valve explains.
We've just released Steam Labs Experiment #009: The News Hub! 🔬✨
Discover all of the cool events, news, and activities happening in your games with a personalized hub that makes it easy to find the updates you're interested in!https://t.co/SO1Qk73qLj
— Steam (@Steam) March 5, 2020
It works in the way you’d expect of a feed in how you find recent and past news, too. You can keep track of recent events going on from your games as you scroll down and upcoming events when you scroll up. There are also options to tweak the hub’s view, and some more personalisation options coming in the next few weeks, too.
The five primary sources news and notifications will stem from are as follows: games in your library, wishlist, followed (via their store page), those Steam recommends based on what you like to play, and from the Steam Blog (or Steamworks Blog if you’re a dev there). It’s ready to test in Steam Labs now if you’re keen to take a look.
While the Steam News Hub is just a prototype in for testing at the moment, Valve says it’s “pretty sure this new feature is going to become a full Steam feature soon” – the studio just wants to get user feedback to get it right before it launches.
In the meantime, be sure to take a look at our lists of the best free Steam games, best PC games, and upcoming PC games, if you’re keen to get that News Hub feed filled up with goodies to show you.