In 2019, Valve announced the Steam Labs initiative – a series of experimental changes to Steam that users can opt-in to try and provide feedback on. Today, the first of those experimental features has been finalised and pushed live. The Steam search function has gotten a big overhaul that should make finding games a whole lot easier.
Steam searches now let you set a maximum price on results, or filter to only show games that are on sale. You can also now specifically exclude certain tags from your results, so if you want to look for indie titles and exclude horror and Early Access games, you can do so. The ‘relevance’ sort has been updated to weight your tag choices and bring you the games you’re most likely to like.
You can also quickly hide games that you’ve already bought, wishlisted, or chosen to ignore. There’s also now a universal option to exclude VR-only games from the list, so you don’t have to be bothered by anything that requires a headset.
Search pages now feature infinite scroll, so you can keep moving down through an infinite list of games – or you can change back to the old system under your store preferences, if you prefer pagination.
The Steam search update was originally intended mostly to adjust the ranking algorithms, as Valve explains in the release announcement, but user feedback pushed it to be a broader rework of the search function. Check out a load of free Steam games if you want something to search for next time you’re on Valve’s store.