Official Group for Steamworks Development Support

Today's Steam update upgrades the editing tools for Steam Events & Announcements to now use the same visual editor tools that we rolled out for store pages a few months ago (Read about that update here).

You no longer need to mess with special bbcode formatting tags. Instead, there are buttons along the top of the editor to easily format text, add links, insert images, build tables, and manage bulleted lists.

Read on for details, including a fun section of history and stats about Steam Events & Announcements.

Insert any number of images as a carousel for players to click through. You can even enable auto-advance so the carousel flips through the images automatically over time.

See exactly how your post will look as you work, with a real-time preview of your text, images, and other formatting. No more needing to flip between the editor and preview mode to see the lay out of your text; although you can still use preview mode to see how your post looks within the context of the rest of the event page.

If you've already got a draft of your update or news post in Microsoft Word, Google Doc, or other writing tools, you can easily paste that content into the new editor and preserve all the supported formatting. bulleted list, headlines, italics, and more.

Note that there are some limitations to how Steam can interact with the Windows clipboard. Copying a mix of images and text from web sources (web-based Word docs or Google Docs) should work well, but other sources won't always be able to preserve the images. Copying and pasting an image individually seems to work just fine.

Now you can paste images directly into the visual editor, or drag-and-drop from a folder on your desktop directly into the editor space.

Any uploaded image will also be saved in the 'Previously uploaded images' section to the right of the editor. And of course you can still work the previous way by specifically selecting and uploading files in the 'Previously uploaded images' section and then insert them into your description.

Click the new 'edit' icon in the corner of any image in your editor and choose a different file from your previously uploaded images to easily swap.

Some other improved usability tools come along with the new tool:

• Spellcheck - We all love the helpful assistance when cleaning up the red squiggly lines of misspelled words

• Keyboard shortcuts - Use typical key strokes such as CTRL+b for bold or CTRL+i for italics and so forth. Hover over a button in the editor to see the keyboard shortcut.

• Undo/redo - Use the new explicit buttons to undo/redo or keyboard shortcuts ( CTRL+z / CTRL+y )

The modern version of the Steam Events & Announcements system was introduced with the big Steam Library update of 2018. These tools introduced a better way for developers to communicate directly with players in Steam. With this system, developers can write a single post about an update, event, or other game-related news and it will appear to players in the Steam library, store page, and community hub.

We've seen the volume of posts by game developers more than double over the past seven years.

At the same time, we've seen players engage more and more with these posts. In 2024 alone, Steam saw developers post a combined 265,009 news, updates, and announcement posts, which were read by players a total of 2.3 Billion times ('read' meaning that the post was clicked on by a player, opening the details view with the full body of the post).