Pin Steam games to Windows 8 Start with Steam Tile and Pin More‏

If you are a Windows user and you like games, you will surely know Steam. And if you're also using Windows 8, you'll probably also like the idea of having your best Steam games pinned to your Start screen, with an attractive Live Tile, so they're always close at hand. Well, that's exactly what applications from the Windows Store like Steam Tile and Pin More allow us.

Steam Tile is a free application, which does exactly what its name suggests (no more, no less), it allows us to log in With Steam, it displays our list of games, and there we can choose which ones pin to the home screenIt also gives us editing options to customize the visual appearance of the Tiles according to their size. There's even the option to display achievements earned and hours played for each title (as seen in the screenshot above, for Portal 2).

Tile editing view in Pin More (Steam Tile editing interface is very similar). "

Pin More, the other alternative that we review, is paid (1.49 euros), but in return it offers us more functions . It integrates with Origin, EA&39;s gaming platform, and also allows you to pin documents, folders and web pages In all cases the Tiles can be customized in the same way more accurate than with Steam Tile. If we want to test the application before paying, it is possible to download it for free and create up to 4 fully functional Live Tiles.

Something that is awkward about both applications is that clicking on a Tile to start the corresponding game loads first the application that we used to create the shortcut, and after that we are redirected to the game.For example, in the case of the screenshot at the top of this post, clicking on Star Wars Battlefront II will first open the Steam Tile, and then load the game. It doesn&39;t take long, but it&39;s visually annoying.

In case none of these applications convince us, remember that we can always pin Steam games in the traditional way : searching for them in the list of applications, selecting the game we want, and choosing the anchor option with the contextual menu. The downside of this is that the Tile that will appear will be smaller (medium size, not wide) and much less visually appealing, since it will show a standard Windows icon and will not display additional information (such as hours played or achievements unlocked). "