Valve has just released a big update for Steam that offers a number of small but significant tweaks to the digital games store. Many of these changes have been available in beta for months, but now they’re hitting the software’s stable release channel. The update overhauls the downloads page and introduces a much improved section for managing your storage, amongst a host of other tweaks and fixes.
The downloads page has seen the bulk of the improvements. For starters, as well as showing download progress, the page also now shows installation progress. It should cut down on those frustrating moments when a game appears to be fully downloaded but isn’t playable because it’s not yet fully installed. The priority of downloads in the queue can now be easily reordered by dragging and dropping them, and the interface generally looks a lot cleaner overall. The “View News” button has been renamed “Patch Notes,” to make it easier to find what’s changed in a currently-downloading update, so long as developers have provided that information.
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Steam’s storage management section has also been improved to make it easier to see your available storage and move games between drives. You can get to it by going to Settings, Downloads, and then clicking “Steam Library Folders.”
Those are the main improvements, but there are a host of other tweaks and fixes included in the update, which should be available to all users now. Steam should update itself automatically, but you can also click on “Steam” in the software’s menu bar, and then selecting “Check for Steam Client Updates…” to manually check. You can check out a full list of changes on Steam’s website.
