Have we just had a glimpse of Steam's new design?

Steam's About page recently had a refresh and as well as explaining what it is ("the ultimate destination for playing, discussing, and creating games"), there's a gif of someone firing up Portal 2 in the launcher. The thing is, it doesn't look like the current interface design. Sure, it's a vague and abstract series of images, but if you didn't expect Steam users would take this as a sign of what it's definitely going to look like in a future update then you don't know them very well.

Posters on the r/Steam subreddit have already begun making mockups of theoretical new looks. Here's one by u/inteNsE-- with a very flat design that does look a lot like what the gif shows, with believable labels on what are blank icons in the small gif. Bit of wasted space under the list of friends who play CS: GO, though.

And here's another by u/Aveniir which looks a bit less like the gif but makes nicer use of space, at least to my eyes. Note that this mockup shows they have Half-Life 3 installed yet shockingly not listed among their favorites. What a bleak future.

We know from Valve's recent blog post about the changes coming to Steam this year that a Library update is on the way. We'll just have to wait and see what it actually looks like, however. Meanwhile, here's a look back at the visual evolution of Steam over the last 15 years.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.