I'm using the Steam Beta client, so this may or may not be present in the stable client yet, but I just noticed a "Customize" button for the first time on the Steam home page just now, and when I clicked on it it gave me the opportunity to choose to opt in or out of seeing various categories of products on the home page. This is something I've wished to be able to do for quite some time now and which I figured Valve would never consider doing for business reasons, but it appears that they have come to their senses or whatever and are making the Steam store configurable so you see more of what you want to see and less of what you don't want to see. I for one don't want to see Early Access games, nor Pre-order games, so I'll be lopping both of those off pronto!

Here is the list of categories you can choose to disable:

Top Sellers
Early Access Products
Games already in your account
Recommended For You
Prepurchase
Software
DLC for your games & software
Videos

The only 2 which are showing as mandatory are "Popular New Releases" and "Games", which makes sense (or why visit the page in the first place).

Anyhow, I have not heard this feature mentioned anywhere so I thought I'd pass the info on in case others might appreciate this new feature on Steam as well.


Update: Unfortunately, Early Access games still show up in your "game exploration queue", hopefully the make that configurable in the future also.

That's been there since they overhauled the store page with the new look a while ago.

Really? Crap, I totally missed it until just now then... LOL Funny because I'm always complaining about being forced to see all of the Early Access crap all the time, that drives me nuts. :)

I just noticed there are a few other areas that let you configure stuff like this too, got my Steam all pimped out now. They've made a shit tonne of consumer friendly changes to Steam store in the last year, I hope GOG steals some of their better ideas for the GOG store also. :)

Sad that you can't filter out Free to Play games though. :/

Good, I don't want to see the "Early Access" games until they have been finished.

Yeah, that would be another nice filter addition although I don't mind seeing them show up from time to time as some of them are decent even if most of them are annoying or crap. :) Perhaps they'll enhance it with more options later on based on feedback, etc. though too.

I hope those are all hidden by default...

Even if you can opt out of them in some areas, you can't do so in every one. And some of us don't even get a banner for those early access games.

In short, while less annoying than it used to be, it's still annoying.

It's already configurable. Go here - http://store.steampowered.com/explore/ and click on Customize.

Right on! No idea how I missed that too, it's probably been there for like a year and went over my head. Duh! :)
I just killed Early Access and unreleased games from showing up in the explore queue now too, awesomesauce.

To me, the most useful would be a feature to block publishers.

I want that too. And frankly, any genre to be honest. I've no need to see sports, hidden object or adventure games (the last I actually enjoy, I'll find the good ones through other sites anyway).

I just noticed that I've been seeing a lot of recommended but I can't seem to block it, it must be a different customize button (not the first one to the right at the site).

Is there any way to opt-out of GoG offers for Early-access/Prepurchase, DLC for games I do not already have, and free-with-purchase opportunities? These lesser-quality offers are popping up more and more frequently, and in addition to voting with my closed wallet, I'd prefer to not see any of those offers anyway.

Beware! A powerful necromancer stalks the land!