Valve knows you. It sees the games you own, and it knows which you’re actually playing — and now it’s going to use that information to improve your shopping experience.
The company announced today that it is bringing new features to its PC digital-distribution network with something called the Steam Discovery Update. Valve specifically designed this patch to help optimize browsing its online game store to better deal with the deluge of new releases on Steam. The big change is that the Steam homepage will now make recommendations based on what you’re playing, your past purchases, and what your friends like, and it will present them to you up front and center every time you log in.
Finding games you will like on Steam has turned into something of a chore. Since the start of 2014, developers have submitted more than 1,300 new games to Steam. The company has also enabled developers to even release games before they are finished through an Early Access portal. This has made it difficult to make sense of what is good and what is bad. Valve understands that, and it wants to fix the problem. Steam holds a dominant position in the PC-gaming market. It has millions of customers logging on every day, but Valve doesn’t want to take them all for granted.
“We have made great efforts to increase the number of titles we can publish on Steam, which means more choices for customers,” Valve user-interface designer Alden Kroll said. “This update introduces multiple features and functionality to help customers explore Steam’s growing catalog and find the games they are most interested in playing.”
The new system will work differently for everyone, but the idea is simple. If you have a ton of strategy games in your library, you’ll see more from that genre as well as potentially games that other strategy fans enjoy that you may not have considered previously.
Above: A curator focusing on sci-fi games on Steam.
In addition to the recommendation engine, Valve is updating Steam’s search with a number of new filters. This will enable you to find exactly what you want across a different categories. You can filter your search by tags or even by feature. For example, you can search through games that only support controllers. Combine filters to narrow down the results even further.
Finally, Valve is introducing Steam Curators. These are people or institutions that publish their reviews to Steam and make recommendations. If you follow a curator, you’ll see what games they like on your home page.
For developers, Steam is hoping these new tools will connect more people with games they may like. Studios can check their Steam-traffic analytics to see how often their products are appearing in front of people, but Valve isn’t giving developers a ton of options to boost the visibility of specific games.
“Steam automatically shows games to customers in different ways and many different places,” reads a Steam guide for developers. “The visibility of any give game on Steam is based on many factors, including how customers are reacting to that product, and who the potential audience is for that product.”
Valve goes on to explain that Steam will do its best to automatically figure out the best places to feature every game, and the online store will have more places than ever before to highlight new releases.
Of course, Valve could make quite a bit more money by letting developers pay to get their games in front of more people — but that’s something that the company is not interested in pursuing.
“You focus on making a compelling, interesting, and unique game,” reads the Steam guide. “And Steam will work out the best places to feature your game based on customers’ interests, preferences, and feedback.”