Smaller games are making more money on Steam, and Valve thinks it’s because of its recent Discovery Update.
Last night, Valve released a report to its SteamworksDev group (via Reddit) that details the effects of the changes the company made to how its Steam digital-distribution portal works. In September, the company updated Steam to improve game discovery. This involved an algorithm that provided every gamer with their own personalized “Discovery Queue.” It also included the introduction of Steam Curators, who are people who Steam customers can follow and get recommendations from. These changes were important to developers because no other online store even comes close to accounting for Steam’s volume of PC sales, but every week more games clutter that market. And the people making software for PC were starting to feel like they were getting drowned out in the $25 billion computer-gaming market.
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“Prior to the Discovery Update, the [front page carousel of games that we refer to as the main capsule] could only show 10-to-20 games per day to every user,” Steam manager Tom Giardino writes in the developer report. “[That was] regardless of what those customers owned, what they played, and what they liked. As a result of the changes introduced with the Steam Discovery Update, now over 4,000 unique titles are shown and clicked on via the main cap every day.”
That alone is a major improvement, and one that should make many smaller developers feel better about releasing their games on Steam. Prior to the update, studios tried to time their launches so that they would get as long as possible on the “new release” list on the front page of Steam. Now, Steam is regularly rolling these kinds of games in front of the players most likely to care about them even months after they come out.
And showing 4,000 games instead of 20 isn’t splitting the same amount of traffic among more games.
“Clicks on the Main Capsule make up 25 percent of all clicks on the Steam home page, up from 21 percent before the update,” Giardino wrote. “This strong increase in interaction demonstrates that customers are finding the personalized main capsule more relevant and valuable.”
Across all of Steam, product-page views have increased by 30 percent since the update. The discovery queue, that algorithm-based recommendation engine that is different for each gamer, now makes up 16 percent of all product views and it contributed 75 percent to the increase.
A lot of Steam Curators
“There are now over 6,000 curators on Steam with at least 10 followers and a total of 1.3 million users follow at least one curator,” Giardino wrote.
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But he said that it’s difficult for Steam to tell if they’re really making a difference. Valve cannot tell if gamers go to a product page and decide to buy a game or not because an outfit like PC Gamer recommends it. The company is working on developing new ways to track that kind of data.
“[What] we do know is that 3.1 million unique users have found their way to a store page via a curator, which means they were browsing the list of curators, or they saw the curator’s recommendation in their activity feed,” wrote Giardino.
But Valve says that while a lot of people have used curators to discover games, they haven’t done so on a regular basis.
“The day-to-day interactions [with curators] are not as high as we’d like,” wrote Giardino . “And we know we need to make some changes to better expose curators. We think the general notion of editorialized and community-curated content has a lot of potential to help users discover new content and make better informed decisions, but we still have work to do to make better use of information generated by curators.”
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He did not list any changes that Valve is planning for how the curation system works.
More money for everyone
While curators need some improvement, Valve has found that hasn’t held back more developers from making more money.
“Thanks to the Discovery Update, customers appear to be getting better and more personalized information, and acting on it,” Giardino wrote. “In addition to the raw increases in traffic, we’ve also carefully monitored sales data to make sure we’re growing the size of the pie, rather than just adjusting the size of the slices. Steam’s overall growth doesn’t just come from the biggest hits,which continue to see great success, but also from the smaller titles that are now better able to reach the audience that is right for them.”
To see if the changes were helping smaller games, Valve looked at all of its software outside of the top 500 best-sellers. It found that total revenue for those releases has grown by 18 percent and daily earnings per app have increased by 5 percent.
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That alone is a big sign that the new Steam is working and that even if a game gets lost on its release day among two dozen Android ports, it still has a chance to make some cash.
And that was Valve’s goal all along. That doesn’t mean it’s finished tinkering with how Steam works, but it is evidence that the company is likely on the right path.
“The Discovery Update has helped show off more of the Steam catalog in a way that helps customers find products that they are likely to enjoy,” writes Giardino. “[It also proves gamers will] provide information necessary to make better-informed purchase decisions. We still think there are lots of areas for improvement, and we will continue to iterate on many of these features.”