Valve made more than 27 million unique images for Counter-Strike listings as part of its new 'major update' to Steam's Community Market

As Steam has grown over the years, so has the Steam Community Market, the online marketplace where Steam users buy and sell in-game items and other digital stuff to one another. To accommodate that growth, Valve has kicked off a beta test for a major update to the market, designed to make it easier to sell your stuff, and buy other people's stuff.

"Over the past few years, the number of games participating in the Market has grown significantly," Valve wrote. "More than 13,000 games now have Steam Community items available on the Market, and more than 700 have in-game items. These game economies have outgrown the Market’s existing browsing and discovery tools, so it's time for an upgrade."

The upgrade in question is very Valve-like, featuring new and expanded tools that provide "a deeper understanding of item data from games," thereby making it easier to find what you want and understand what you're looking at.

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Some of it is very basic stuff—bigger listing images, for instance—and other bits, like improved graphs, dive deeper into the data for the benefit of serious buyers and sellers. The market search function has been upgraded with new dynamic filters, and switching between in-game items and community items has also been simplified. You'll also find similar items now grouped together on a single page, and like Steam itself, "a new, wider layout to accommodate a full-width grid of items for sale."

(Image credit: Valve)

Counter-Strike players will be among the first to notice the changes: Valve said that, "since Counter-Strike items are popular in the Community Market (and a game we work closely with) we’ve used them to experiment and build out this extensive item integration, but we look forward to other games leveraging these same new features."

One of the most obvious changes on that front will be the new images generated specifically for individual items, which will now "showcase each item's unique features," including wear, patterns, and applied accessories, without requiring prospective buyers to launch into the game to see the item live. And that's not just for new listings: "As part of our internal testing we generated over 27,000,000 unique images to backfill existing Counter-Strike listings," Valve said.

The Steam Community Market pages are being updated today, and so will likely be live by the time you get around to them. The beta is live by default for all marketplace users, but if you need to opt out of it for some reason, an "exit beta" button is available at the top of the item and search pages.

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