Opensource it and let users choose the levers. Otherwise fuck off. I don’t need another brain rot feed I have to figure out how to block or ignore in my life
I’m confused; haven’t Steam sales been making recommendations based on the games I play for years now? They’ve been doing it for so long I don’t even remember when it started.
Unsure how I feel about this
I don’t like steams discovery system. It’s not good, and the numbers show that most devs don’t get any exposure.
Steam has a Pareto skew problem: the top games get all the attention, and the long tail of games get none.
Steam also has a large undiagnosed
observer biasinspection bias problem, where there’s a large contingent of people who spend a lot of time on games but their recommendations are absolutely god awful for normal players. But they make up all the metrics (play time, games played, achievements, etc), so in most algorithms they’ll be over represented. This effect gets stronger the more niche a game is.Steams user tags are also kinda awful. They’re a total kitchen sink: I played Crimson Desert, now steam recommends the “dragon” tag for me. Well, the top “dragon” games are not at all like an action game that happens to have dragons. Same with “horses” tag. This is somewhere that better tag weighting could help, but also the combination of tags is hugely important.
Sometimes I don’t open steam for more than a year, my recommendations in discovery queue are so far removed from what I want it’s insane.
Is there a steam tag database? Would be fun to play with their data.
Edit: inspection bias not observer bias
I like a few graphic novel games. Now Steam recommends a deluge of GRAPHIC novel games that have zero interesting story or hook to them, because the tag system. It’s kind of nuts
It may have skew for bigname game users, but for somebody that has random tastes its done a decent job at showing me games.
I.e. I mainly play Mudrunner/Snowrunner, MechWarrior 5 Mercs, and Wingspan. Steam showed me a single mission indie shooter that cost $1. I enjoyed it. Very limited replay value. And Beacon Patrol…which I also enjoyed.
I would like them to separate genre out of the tag system and curate the list of genres themselves, create strict guidelines for devs to select genres for their games, and let customers discover games via genre instead of tags. IMO the tag system is the worst thing they’ve ever added to the store.
Overall, this sounds like a really good change for Steam. Instead of Valve manually picking things, or developers scheduling specific stuff to get a slot - you will hopefully see more of what you’re directly interested in.
No this is not a good thing. It’s going to result in you just being shown the type of stuff you play. It’s literally no different to the Youtube and Facebook algorithms that just ensure you see nothing but the same shit in a different package all the time.
Ya, I like it when I get the stuff I like but I also don’t see anything new and different that I may also enjoy. Part of what I hate about things like spotify also.
Will it push any vr on me? if not nothing will change for me. I have like 20 flat games and over 110 vr, steam never shows me vr in that popup after first load, or on that “for you feed” forget what its actually called as I stopped looking at it, I have to actively look for any vr I want to get
If you don’t have it, Derail Valley Simulator is both flat and native VR, you can learn to drive trains. You can also learn how to crash them.
Derail Valley Simulator
Well, there is a game now on my wishlist, thank you Kender. HEY! Where are my boot and belt buckles?
Lmao well all my friends are getting Transport Fever 3 on their Steam Front Page, I think partly because I’m such a nerd for trains and I got it day 1
I already play a crapton of niche games, about a third of which I found through Steam recs. I thought they were already doing something like this, especially with the custom release calendar.
I feel like my library is so huge and varied it would be impossible to market a specific niche to me.
If they go by play times though, I’ll only ever see games with the [dwarf] tag.
Last time I ran a discovery queue, 9/10 items were included because “it is popular” and not because it was related to any items I purchased and played. So I don’t have high hopes for anything changing for the better here.
Let me guess… it’s going to rely on the tags system. And another guess… they aren’t going to do anything to stop devs and consumers putting tags I like on shovelware that I would never buy in a million years.
What would you like them to do about your personal problem? Veto games? Curate only the most hyped of games and give no chance to smaller devs or crazy niche projects? Choosing what to buy is your problem, their problem is making sure that games that might interest you (and other consumers) get the visibility they need. Bad games still fall into genre, and it’s the consumer’s responsibility/right to decide for themselves what is a good or bad game.
Millions of kids love Roblox, to me, that game looks and is utter garbage. But would I want Steam/platforms to say what is good? Not really.
Personally, I’d like a way to filter by rating level.
