Valve is changing Steam store pages to benefit larger monitor owners

Revamps to the Steam store and client seem to be coming quite frequently, going by recent updates. The latest change is targeting the store's store pages again, this time making the content fit a larger area than before.

"Available today in the Steam client beta, Steam store pages have changed from being 940px wide to now 1200px wide," Valve explains in its Steamworks developer blog. "This change takes place as we work our way through various parts of the Steam store to modernize the design and provide a better experience for players with larger monitors."

The store pages' new width is aimed at improving the shopping experience, according to Valve, offering bigger screenshots and trailers, as well as more space to describe the games in the written areas below. Smaller screen users, or those on windowed browser tabs, will still see a scaled-down version as before.

Valve says that developers shouldn't have to do anything extra to validate their existing content for the new width, except make sure any embedded images in the description are now the right size. The preview option when editing store pages will now show the new wider store to make sure everything looks good as well.

Outside of the layout changes, Valve has also opened up support for .mp4 and .webm for embedding video content in the description area. Before, only the .gif format was supported for animations. The max supported size for each of these files will be 100 MB, and they have to be less than 12 seconds long.

On a much more important note, the development team at Valve also commented on how their members pronounce GIF:

"We on the Steam team are pretty split on how to pronounce it. Regardless of which way you are inclined, be prepared for some heated debates should you share your opinion on the internet."

To test everything out, you can switch to the Steam Beta Client by heading to the app's Settings > Interface section and changing the Client Beta Participation dropdown to the latest version available.

Valve says that the layout and video format change beta will run for a few weeks before it gives the update to everyone on Steam, giving developers enough time to make any changes that are required.