Steam is changing how sale events appear on game store pages. Promotional banners at the top are being removed and replaced with a new personalized section next to “More Like This”. The new section will be personalized for each player, highlighting games from the sale that Steam thinks they're most likely to enjoy. If a game is part of several sales at once, Steam will prioritize the one with the most games recommended for that player. Steam says the goal is to reduce clutter and help players “focus on what they are looking for on a store page.”

Steam’s review process is facing criticism from indie developers over the growing number of AI-generated games. Publisher 2 Left Thumbs says the flood of AI-generated submissions overwhelmed Steam’s review queue, delaying Wheel Make It by almost 3 weeks. Despite having over 11k wishlists, the game peaked at just 15 concurrent players during launch. Valve’s Tom Giardino defended its position saying: “We don’t want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn’t use.”

Steam Deck owners can now make their handheld look like a PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox 360, PSP or even a PS2 thanks to unofficial community-made plugins. The new BenderThemes plugin lets users transform SteamOS Game Mode with interfaces inspired by consoles including the PS2, PS5, PSP, Xbox and Xbox 360. Users can switch between different designs, customize how their game library is displayed and even change how the Steam Store and collections are organized. There's also a separate Decky Xbox Dashboard plugin that recreates the Xbox Series X|S home screen, complete with tabs for games, the Store, Community and System.

Steam has apparently removed a game accused of stealing code from another copycat. The developer of Needle In A Haystack claims that A Game About Needle In A Haystack copied its code “word for word,” even leaving “our own error messages” unchanged. According to the developer, the copied code appeared in demo builds released on September 20 and 21, while the accused game launched on October 16, 2026. The game has since disappeared from Steam

Steam is down right now. A lot of players are getting stuck on “Loading User Data” and can’t access their Steam libraries. The Store and Community pages still seem to work, but the Steam client is having problems. Valve hasn’t said what’s causing the outage yet.

Steam Deck OLED is getting HDR streaming back. Valve has re-enabled HDR in Steam Remote Play with the latest Steam Beta update, after temporarily disabling it earlier this month because of brightness issues that could make streamed games look overexposed. The update also adds a new HDR setting >Automatic, On or Off, “On” can also increase brightness when displaying SDR content >A brightness slider has been added to the streaming overlay >HDR capture now works through PipeWire on desktop Linux >HDR streaming from macOS is now supported >Android 15+ phones can stream HDR through the Steam Link Beta app

Steam’s Personal Calendar is now officially available after nearly a year in Steam Labs with personalized list of recent and upcoming games based on what you play. • Steam analyzes your most-played games and finds players with similar habits. • It uses what those players play or wishlist to recommend games. • The calendar covers 8 weeks and updates daily. • It includes wishlisted games, Early Access titles, and DLC. • Developers cannot pay for placement, recommendations are automatic. Steam says users click more than 2,000 different games every 24 hours via the calendar.

Steam Next Fest is becoming a bigger gamble for indie developers, according to Palworld publishing lead John “Bucky” Buckley. He says the event has always had plenty of games that get almost no attention, but the situation is even tougher now with thousands of releases and the rise of AI-slop games “Steam randomizes the games heavily for the first few days,” but after 24 hours, “all the discourse tends to be about the same 25-ish games.” Despite that, he believes Next Fest is “still worth taking” the gamble on. “the cream rises to the top” but most games simply “sink to the bottom and rot almost immediately.”

Steam Next Fest is facing huge backlash over the rise of AI-slop and low-effort games. The October event has 8,011 demos, nearly twice as many as June., developers say the flood of low-quality “AI slop” is making it harder for real indie games worth to play Back in June, roughly 1 in 5 games at Steam Next Fest disclosed using AI. Now, just a few months later, that number has jumped to around 1 in 3. Some developers have even avoided public demos because they fear their games could be copied.

Steam wishlists are becoming less useful for predicting sales. A new analysis looked at 160 Steam games released between 2020 and 2025 and compared their wishlists with their sales. The results are pretty clear: >Games released between 2020 and 2022 had higher wishlist-to-sales conversion. >For games released between 2023 and 2025, the median conversion rate was roughly half as high after one and six months.