Steam is going to let you know what your friends are playing.
Steam is going to let you know what your friends are playing.
Categories

Valve spruces up the Steam store with better social features, networking, and reach

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

Valve’s Steam digital game store has new competition for developers from the rival Epic Games Store, and so the company is upgrading its features to make Steam more attractive. It is adding, for instance, indicators that show if a friend is playing a particular game in a gamer’s Steam Library.

At the Game Developers Conference 2019 in San Francisco, Valve’s Tom Giardino and a few colleagues are giving a talk about Steam’s goodness in the face of Epic Games’ aggressive push to give developers more help, such as charging developers a fee of only 12 percent of game proceeds compared to Steam’s 30 percent take.

Unlock premium content and VIP community perks with GB M A X! Join now to enjoy our free and premium perks. 

Join now →

Sign in to your account.

Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.