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Valve introduces Steam Labs for demoing experimental features

See what kind of cool widgets and applications Steam has in store for you with this new section.

Brittany Vincent

July 11, 2019 1:00 PM

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Steam is working to put together a variety of new and exciting features, and you'll be able to see them soon – if you decide to check out the new Steam Labs feature, where you can see all the cool stuff Valve has up its sleeve for the platforming the near future.

For the first time ever, Valve is giving folks a peek behind the curtain at some of its coolest new projects with Steam Labs, where you can see the team's experimental features with cool codenames like The Peabody Recommender or Organize Your Steam Library Using Morse Code – silly things like that.

You can hang out in this playground of sorts and try all these cool new features out to see what works, and if you think Valve should continue experimenting, you can let them know via the Steam Labs setup to continue the work they're doing and what they should change or leave exactly as-is.

There are three different "experiments" that users can check out first as part of the Labs' initial launch: Micro Trailers, which are six-second game trailers arranged on a page to easily digest at a glance. You can check all those out here to see what they look like.

Next, the Interactive Recommender looks at all the top-played games in your collection and uses machine learning to help recommend other titles it thinks you might also enjoy. If you want it to recommend games based on other things in your library, you can change its aim and help it to learn what you like by having it examine different collections.

Finally, the Automated Show is a half-hour video that rolls up all the latest Steam launches into one video that you can get a quick injection of new Steam content from easily all at once.

These are just three of the newest things you can experience by way of Steam Labs, but more are certainly coming. These could even be part of Steam going forward if they perform well. Let Valve know what you think of everything and we'll see how the programs evolve going forward.

Brittany Vincent

Senior Editor

Fueled by horror, rainbow-sugar-pixel-rushes, and video games, Brittany is a Senior Editor at Shacknews who thrives on surrealism and ultraviolence. Follow her on Twitter @MolotovCupcake and check out her portfolio for more. Like a fabulous shooter once said, get psyched!