Steam makes a small change that gets lots of PC gamers overly excited

Steam has tweaked the process of grabbing free PC games or DLC to make it a bit more convenient, and it’s a change which has been met with quite the outpouring of happiness (or bewilderment in a few cases).

If you’re a regular Steam user, you’ll doubtless recall that if a game is free on Steam and you want the title, to claim it, you have no choice but to elect to hit play, which fires up the installation process. You can then cancel out of that, after a short wait while the cogs whir a bit, but this is a bit of unnecessary faffing about.

Now, Valve has introduced an ‘Add to Library’ button which can be clicked to add the product to your games library, and that’s that – no messing around canceling an installation you don’t want is required.

Similarly with free DLC, when nabbing that, the game is launched – and now rather than having that happen, you can just click to grab the content, and you’re done; a clearly easier and more convenient process.

Analysis: Jumping for joy amidst bouts of head scratching

There’s been a good deal of celebration about what’s effectively a small – but useful – tweak here. Indeed, our sister site PC Gamer (opens in new tab) spotted that this had happened and declared it was an ‘absolutely majestic’ change for the better, no less.

Others on the likes of Reddit have been singing similar praises, amidst comments that it took Valve long enough to do this, and it really should’ve happened years ago. With other gamers are scratching their heads or shrugging their shoulders about why some people are making such a big deal out of this.

As one denizen of Reddit (opens in new tab) put it: “Wait, what? I mean on one hand, why did it take so long? On the other, closing that dialogue box was that hard?”

Well, in fairness, it wasn’t an especially big deal, but this is still a quality of life improvement we’re glad to see happen on Steam, particularly when there might be a whole heap of bits of DLC to pick up (which then might mean the user doesn’t bother, rather than having to repeatedly suffer the game being started up).