For years, one of my biggest annoyances with Steam has been the confusing and complicated way of getting from a game to the developer’s other projects. That’s finally being fixed, alongside other updates to developer and publisher homepages on Steam.
This update should fix the issue that comes when clicking a developer’s name on their game page. That normally took you to the publisher’s page, flooded with unrelated titles, which made it hard to find games from studios you already liked. The updates will let developers link to their own pages much more easily. It adds better social media integration and gives developers more prominence when players are buying games. Before, linking a new game to a developer or publisher’s homepage was a multi-step process, often requiring you to go to different pages in Steamworks.
Now, developers can link their games directly to their homepage from the same store page editor, where they enter the developer and publisher names. This smoother integration makes the whole process much less frustrating. This way, more developers will want to link to their own pages instead of letting publishers do the difficult parts, which may have contributed to developer links leading to the publisher’s page.
Another big improvement is that Steam now shows social media links right on developer and publisher homepages. This small but useful change lets creators build stronger connections with their fans by sending players to their Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, or personal websites.
Setting up a developer or publisher homepage comes with major benefits. One of the biggest is the ability to send email notifications to followers whenever a new game comes out. Even if a studio works with a bigger publisher that already has a homepage, having its own separate studio page lets players follow them directly and get updates just for that studio.
When it comes to big publishers like Devolver Digital or Team17, it becomes a pain to get notified about every one of their games when you just like one or two developers. This is also really valuable for smaller studios trying to build a dedicated fan base.
Steam also made sure you don’t have to go to a developer’s game to find them. The update lets them create custom URLs for homepages, like www.steampowered.com/developer/thestudioname. This gives you a much easier way to remember the web address. The homepage will be curated by developers and can be organized by series, genre, or any other category.
While that’s nice, what’s cool is that announcements will finally be posted on developer homepages. No more needing to find a social media account or read updates on a random game to find out what’s going on with a developer. Anyone who has tried to keep up with an indie developer on Steam knows the struggle: you hopefully won’t need to visit as many Discord servers or Patreon pages to find all of a developer’s work in one place.
