Steam Gets Smaller By Bringing Back The Littlest Library

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Change is scary, I get it. Over Halloween, Valve put a bullet in the old Steam library and brought in a flashy new look, filled with visual flair and more customisation for your categories. But what if you liked things barren? What if you just want a big flat list of all your stuff to pick from? While the old library is dead and gone, Valve have conceded that some folk might want that simplicity back. In service of this, "Small Mode" has been brought back from the grave.

Steam's makeover brought in a bunch of new features when it was introduced, but ditched a "Small Mode" library feature that let you shrink the client to a more compact size. Small Mode's reincarnation was trialled in a beta update last week. Last night, a Steam client update pushed early this morning now lets everyone switch back to a stripped-down library.

It's been given a bit of a glow-up, too, and should now support all those collections and library features its larger brother offers.

You can access Small Mode by looking under the "View" tab at the top of your Steam window. Once activated, Steam will reintroduce itself as the simple drop-down list.

It's a nice option for folks who really couldn't care less for Steam's social bloat and just want to slap on a game with minimal fuss. Want all that nonsense back? A "Large Mode" option (not to be confused with Big Picture) will bring you all the fancy flair of Steam's library homepage.

Yesterday's update also puts an end to some crashes that cropped up in the transition to the new library, while reformatting some newer game page features.

Is it enough, though? Despite this step, the cowards at Valve still won't let us return to Steam's hazy green days - complete with all the anime-tinted, lime green energy-drink-looking custom skin disasters you monsters were slapping on Valve's then-innocent little marketplace.

For shame.

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