Valve's next Steam UI target is the Community Market, with more details and, yes, a wider layout

"Bigger," Gabe Newell chants incessantly at Steam's Valve UI and UX team at Valve. "Larger! More! Never stop making it bigger!" He screams. At least this is what I imagine has been happening over the past year, given the number of size related (mostly widening) changes that's been taking place on the storefront. Today, another UI change is on the way, this time for the Steam Community Market.

As explained in a blog post, the Community Market is a platform that lets people on Steam buy and sell in-game and Steam Community items to one another. "Over the past few years, the number of games participating in the Market has grown significantly," the post states. "More than 13,000 games now have Steam Community items available on the Market, and more than 700 have in-game items. These game economies have outgrown the Market’s existing browsing and discovery tools, so it's time for an upgrade."

The upgrade comes in several flavours. First of all, listings will now be bigger. They can now feature "more images, item descriptions, and callouts for listing specific information such as wear/float, pattern template, applied accessories, etc." In particular, those of you deep into the Counter-Strike economy will find unique images for every item listed on the market. "No more having to fire up the game in order to make your purchasing decision. (Not just new listings! As part of our internal testing we generated over 27,000,000 unique images to backfill existing Counter-Strike listings.)" That's a lot of images!

What else? Unique details can be more clearly displayed, like with Counter-Strike skins more clearly showing what the patterns look like. Listings that are essentially just variations of the same item can be grouped together for easier browsing too. And, what's this? Item pages now have a wider layout too! Hurray, the widening continues!

Economy stat nerds may be happy to see that graphs have been overhauled ("In addition to many general usability and performance fixes, graphs now display volume data alongside price and can display multiple datasets for grouped items"), and you should be noticing some dynamic filters when browsing the market too.

Fairly in depth update for a thing that I have used exactly zero times in the entirety of my Steam life! And yet I'm sure enough of you will find it useful somewhere along the line.