We’ve just launched an open beta for Creator Homepages, a new part of the Steam store designed to help players discover and connect with the developers and publishers behind their favorite games. With this feature, you can explore the full catalog of games created by the developers and publishers of games you enjoy and you can choose to follow those creators to be automatically notified when they release their next title.
How does it work?
Any developer or publisher on the platform can now set up a customized homepage to showcase their full catalog of titles and content. Once set up, these homepages can be found by clicking on the developer or publisher name from the store page of your favorite games.
Check out the official Creator Homepage Announcement Page, which includes a list of all the homepages so far. This will quickly become an overwhelming and unusable list as more developers create their homepages, so at the top of the page we’ve also specifically highlighted the developers and publishers behind games that you’ve recently played.
On these homepages, you’ll find standard lists of top-selling or new released titles from that developer or publisher.
You’ll also find collections that the developer or publisher has created to best highlight their portfolio of games and content available on Steam.
A studio might divide its games into collections by genre or franchise, or could choose to highlight their fan-favorite or top-selling games. A developer of only a single game might primarily dedicate their homepage to announcements of new projects.
Regardless of how each developer or publisher chooses to customize their homepage, you can easily follow them to be notified when they release their next title or post an announcement. Newly released titles from developers or publishers that you follow will show up at the top of your Steam homepage and we’ll send you an e-mail to let you know that they’ve released something new (as with other Steam e-mail notifications, you can opt out at any time by visiting your e-mail preferences page).
Creators can also set up unique URLs within Steam for easy reference to their homepage. You can see an example by following this customized URL for the Valve developer homepage: http://store.steampowered.com/dev/valve
Why Beta?
We’re pretty excited to get the core functionality into the hands of players and give developers the opportunity to set up their presence on Steam. While we haven’t worked out all of the smaller bugs or finished adding every feature we’d like to, we decided that the basic set of functionality is worth putting into the hands of players and creators. We still have a number of features that we are considering adding and there are still a few rough edges that need smoothing out, so opening this system up as a beta to players and developers will help us gather feedback and suggestions that inform the direction of those features.
Over the previous few weeks, we’ve worked with a number of developers and publishers on Steam to get their pages set up and help us work out as many of the bugs as we can. As a player, you’ll find that many of your favorite game makers probably already have a spiffy homepage created and customized. But there are still quite a few developers that have not yet had a chance to set up their pages and will do so during this open beta period.
Looking for more details?
Check out the official Creator Homepage Announcement Page.
For game developers, check out the Creator Homepages Steamworks documentation for more details and information on how the system works, the features that are included, and necessary permissions for game creators.
Reporting bugs and feedback
As always, we’ll keep an eye out for your feedback and suggestions as to what you’d like to see added or changed about this system.
