New Steam UI Possibly Uncovered by Dataminers
Dataminers over at Steam DB managed to uncover new assets added to the client with the new beta update. Said assets are connected to something called SteamU, which might stand for Steam Universal. By the looks of it, it could be a completely new Steam UI. Interestingly, the uncovered files show tabs for movies, music, comics, and TV.
Steam really doesn’t need any introductions. It’s the largest platform for digital distribution of PC games, and is one of the main factors in the resurgence of the indie gaming scene. However, that might be about to change. Steam appears to want to broaden its spectrum of services, at least, according to what dataminers found in the new beta update.
The good people at Steam DB found some very intriguing images and code hiding in the update. The names of the files all point to “SteamU”. As you can see in the image above, it looks like a completely new user interface. Pictured above is likely the new look of the game library. And, sure, it looks pretty nice, but that’s not the fun part.
If you take a look at the tabs, you’ll see some pretty surprising stuff. There are tabs for movies, music, TV, even comics! This might mean that Steam are aiming to get into streaming services akin to Amazon, Netflix and the like. This could turn out to be a huge deal; one that could cause both praise and severe backlash. That is, if this new UI ever does come out.
What we see in the image looks like a mock-up and/or placeholder. We can’t say for certain how serious Valve really is here. However, it’s hard to imagine that they went to such efforts just to troll the community. We’ll have to wait and see.
Very soon after the images were posted, Steam released another beta that got rid of all these files. If you want to have a peek for yourself, though, you can. Steam DB has all the SteamU files stored safely.
