With Steam Labs Experiment 10 last December, we introduced dozens of new genres, categories, and tags to our store's navigation. Today we're launching Experiment 13, where we've revamped these destinations, or store hubs, with powerful new tools for browsing, filtering, and exploring deeper into each category.

When you join the experiment from the Steam Labs page, you will find that every category and tag page on the store has been updated, introducing these new layouts and features to hundreds of niche destinations throughout. You'll encounter these pages by exploring the "Categories" drop-down in the store menu, or by clicking on tags from a game's store page.

Whether you're at work, on the bus, or playing at home, you can now browse your personalized Steam News Hub to easily find updates, announcements, and events for the games you play, wish list, and follow. The News Hub is designed to be flexible and personalized around your games and preferences, with many customization options built in. By default, the News Hub shows posts from the games you play, wish list, follow, or are recommended. Or, if you want to take full control, you can change all that with a few quick setting adjustments in the left-hand menu. Plus, you can choose to follow and receive news from dozens of top gaming news sources across a variety of languages.

First launched as an experiment in Steam Labs in March, the News Hub has been developed with the feedback of players along the way. Today it becomes a full feature of Steam and replaces the previous news feed found at /news.

Available now through Steam, Chat Filtering allows people to customize the language they see from others on the platform. The new Steam feature takes the chat filtering we built for games like CS:GO, Destiny 2, and Dota 2, and moves it into Steam for a customized experience that is consistent across supporting games, the Steam desktop client, web, and mobile chat experiences.

By default, strong profanity and slurs from people you don't know are now obscured in Steam Chat and supporting games. You can set your preferences to turn this off, or to control whether you want the default filters to also apply to chat messages from your Steam Friends. You can also select the type of language that is filtered. And because each player's tolerance for difficult words is unique, we've included the ability to add or remove words to form your personal filter. You may also upload lists of words or phrases from other sources, enabling groups and communities to work together to define and share your own sets of language guidelines. We believe this level of control is especially important given that language is constantly evolving and is used differently among various communities around the world. With Steam chat filtering, we've made sure you can choose to filter language as much as you want, or not at all.

Valve introduced "Play Next" as an experimental feature as part of Steam Labs earlier this year for testing. The feature previously known as "Experiment 008: Play Next" uses machine learning algorithms to provide suggestions to gamers with extensive libraries on what unplayed or very low playtime game in their library they should try next. This technology is also used in Valve's Interactive Recommender and works by identifying comparable games on Steam. The feature is now live for all users in the latest Steam client update and can be found under the Play Next shelf in library view.

Valve is busy as ever in its quest to bring better experiences to gamers all over the world. However, we as gamers can't see what are they working on until it is released. But that is about to change. Valve is today introducing Steam Labs, a community hub for all the experimental features that are being worked on behind the scenes. Valve says that the reason for creating this is that "...we create many experimental features with codenames like The Peabody Recommender and Organize Your Steam Library Using Morse Code. For the first time, we're giving these works-in-progress a home called Steam Labs, where you can interact with them, tell us whether you think they're worth pursuing further, and if so, share your thoughts on how they should evolve."

For now they are releasing three experiments to showcase the purpose of Labs, called Micro Trailers, The Interactive Recommender and The Automated Show. All of these experiments are designed to help users find a game they love. The experiments can be tried out on the Labs website, and after using them you can share your opinions on the Steam Labs cumunity hub. To follow future news and announcements from Steam Labs, you can join the Steam Labs community group.