Valve rolled out a complete revamp of the user interface for its Steam digital distribution platform today. We’ll cut right to the chase: it’s looking mighty slick, a vast improvement over the standard decked-in-green look we’ve become accustomed to these past few years.

Still under rigorous testing, those logging onto Steam today won’t see the new look immediately. There is an easy way to access it, however. Simply open up the settings menu and select the UI Update option under Beta Participation.

In addition to the eye-popping UI enhancements, Valve has increased usability and overall performance of the Steam client, notably swapping the Internet Explorer rendering engine with WebKit. For one, community integration has been kicked up a notch, displaying a widget that contains records of which friends played a certain title, how many hours they’ve logged playing it, and so on. Oh, and group invites or friend requests can now be accepted straight from your friends list, rather than having to open up your profile page.

Suffice to say, we’re highly impressed with the new Steam client beta. With these improvements, we feel Valve has cemented its status as the leader in digital distribution on PC. Instead of rambling on about it further, we recommend checking it out for yourself — now.

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