I’ll be honest with you, I’ve never been the kind of person to get organised—that’s partially because I have a pesky disorder that gets in the way of such things, but it’s also just a personality flaw. I don’t do home decoration, and all my important paperwork sits in a loose jumble in a draw somewhere. I am, however, sorely tempted by a new Steam update.
Per this client beta announcement, Steam users (as long as they’re signed into the beta by going to settings > interface > client beta participation) can now customise each and every single one of the games in their library.
“The Customization tab allows users to view and set custom artwork for the game,” reads the blog post, “And set a custom sort title that will be used instead of the actual title when sorting games in the library.”
As you can see in the example screenshot I took below, you can now upload your own custom cover, background, logo, and wide cover to each game in your library. Obsessed with your Warrior of Light in Final Fantasy 14? Go ahead and put that art commission you got of ’em up there. A fan of Big Naturals Withers? You can now look at him every time you crack open Baldur’s Gate 3.
Or you can do what I’ve done here, which I’m not sure how to describe.
What’s really good for digital homebodies, however, is the “custom sort name” option. After a bit of testing, when using a numerical value, Steam will automatically sort these in descending order. So you could, for example, label games by their release date: One game 2014, one game 2012, and one game 2009. Type in “20” into your search bar, and these games’ll be shown to you in the order they came out. No longer do Yakuza 1 and 2 have to come after Yakuza 6 in your library. Wizardry!
And that’s just one example. You could also borrow a leaf out of our book and give everything a percentile review score. Or just tag everything you actually like with “good stuff” to help sort the wheat from the “I got like 90 games in a bundle and I’ve played none of them” chaff. I hope you organisers have a good time; meanwhile, I’ll keep stewing in my soup of categories I’ve not sorted anything into in 10 years.