Major Update Coming for Steam

Valve has just announced through a press release that a major update for their popular online gaming platform, Steam, will be shipping this summer. The new update will introduce a number of community-based features for users, including the ability to create their own pages, profiles, and groups, schedule games with friends, see who they’ve played with and how well they all played, chat in groups, and much more. These community features will be available for all Steam games. Says Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve:

“Our community has given us great direction on the ways they want to see Steam evolve. Adding these new community features to make it easier to connect with other gamers is something we’ve wanted to see on Steam for a long time and this latest update is just the start. We’ve got a long list of items that we’re working on to make it easier for gamers to connect and play games on Steam.”

This should be a pretty handy update, considering the only way for users to connect beforehand was to set up their own websites and such. This is especially helpful for those who always seem to find themselves on servers full of people flaming each other and shouting random crap to the point where they have to turn voice chat off. It sounds somewhat similar to Xbox Live, but that’s a good thing. This new update will be available free of charge to Steam users in July.