Steam News Hub offers personalized game news
Valve Software, the company behind the gaming platform Steam, launched a new experiment on the platform recently called Steam News Hub.
Steam News Hub informs Steam customers about news, events, and activities of games that they own and games that they are (likely) interested in. Think of it as a personalized news feed that informs you about updates, announcements, new content, and events of games you play or are interested in.
Steam customers may point their browser to https://store.steampowered.com/newshub to access the content. Note that it is required that you sign-in before you see any recommendations (makes sense since the recommendations are based on games in the library and games that you may be interested in).
The default selection shows news posts from games in the library and wishlist, games that a user follows, games that Valve's platform thinks a user might like, and Steam announcements.
All types of news -- events, live-streams, content updates, releases, sales, and news -- are included. You may change these by filtering certain items that you are not interested in.
You could limit sources to games you own, want, or follow, and only get informed about sales, releases, and content updates.
A click on the cogwheel icon on every news item displays options to mute that particular game so that it is no longer included when Steam News Hub updates content. Click on "managed muted apps" in the interface to remove games from the list of exclusions.
How useful is the new experiment?
It is rather difficult to keep an eye on all the games that you play currently. Steam does not really have a section where you can access news related to all the games that you own. While you can open a game's page on Steam to get news and such, it is rather cumbersome.
The new Steam News Hub may change that. While it is a separate option at the time of writing, it could be useful to Steam users who want information about updates, new releases, and other type of content of games they like.
I'd like to see more filters added to make things even better, e.g. filters for "installed games", "recent purchases", "games that friends play", "games that were played a lot in the past", and so on.
Now You: How do you keep an overview of games you are interested in?
It would be interesting to see what news they show about Borderlands 2 and Borderlands the Pre-Sequel.
Both are very old games that have just been updated to add advertisments and the ability to play with those using the Epic launcher. These updates turned out to cause the games to not function for many.
To answer your question, I read about it on steam.
Any time I see “Update Queued” next to a game in my steam list, I immediatly takes steps to stall it (they are automatic and unstoppable for the inexperienced PC user) and go research what the update actually is before I allow it.
I’ve been a steam member for 16 years and I’ve learned my lessons well.