Valve Makes Major Improvements to Steam Market

Key Takeaways

• Valve silently improved the Steam Community Market, enhancing user experience for gamers worldwide.
• Users have noticed a marked increase in responsiveness without an official confirmation from Valve.
• Despite the lack of acknowledgment, improvements to speed on the platform are clearly evident to frequent users.

Valve has made some significant improvements to the speed of the Steam Community Market, which has upgraded the overall user experience for gamers around the world. Interestingly, Valve hasn’t officially confirmed that it changed anything regarding the Steam Community Market, although users have noticed a considerably better experience on the platform recently.

The Steam Community Market was first released in May 2013, along with the Steam Trading Cards feature. Upon its release, players could also use the Community Market to buy and sell items from Valve titles Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and plenty of games have been added in the years since. It is now a staple of the Steam platform, serving as an easy way for players to move their insanely expensive virtual items on to others, or buff up their own inventories without having to trade with another gamer directly.

Conceptually, the Steam Community Market is brilliant. But over the years, it has been plagued with speed issues. Searching for items would take a while, and users were often greeted with error messages that prevented them from finding what they were looking for. Spam-refreshing the page was a temporary solution, but Valve would limit users who made too many requests in a short space of time. However, as pointed out in a Reddit thread by user Huraira91, the Steam Community Market suddenly feels extremely responsive.

Others in the thread agreed, and even just a quick use of the Steam Community Market confirms this. The previous problems were so commonplace and obvious, even to casual users, that this isn’t simply a placebo effect. Despite the obvious improvements, Valve has yet to release any statement confirming the new Steam changes. Frequent Steam Community Market users won’t be complain if it stays as responsive as it feels at the moment.

Steam remains the dominant platform of choice for PC users. While some gamers are committed to DRM-free platforms such as GOG, most remain on Steam. Over the years, plenty of publishers have left Steam for pastures new, attempting to circumvent the 30% cut Valve receives from each game sale. As it turns out, most eventually return to Steam, with Valve’s cut proving to be well worth the exposure. The most recent example of this is Ubisoft, with the company recently confirming that Assassin’s Creed Mirage is finally coming to Steam, with all of its future games coming to the platform on day one. It’s difficult to imagine any other platform achieving such dominance on PC at this point.