It looks like Steam got a big update in terms of UI, specifically geared towards improving game discoverability.
Linky poo:
On top of that the latest numbers are in and Steam has grown by 20 million in just the last 4 months. 100 million active (have purchased games, have logged in in the last 30 days).
While I appreciate what they are trying to do here, I’m not actually seeing anything in my “Discovery Queue” that wasn’t previously in my “Recommended for you.” bin, except for a bunch of stuff that is SO POPULAR that apparently I need help discovering it? Seriously, something like 40% of what’s in my queue is “This item is in your Discovery Queue because it is popular/A Top Seller!” I know I live under a rock and all, but I’m pretty sure I can “discover” this stuff based on the HUGE ASS IMAGES promoting it all on your storefront guys. Do you think I’ve somehow not heard of Day Z after seeing it on your banner ads for like 6 months? I guess maybe you’re going to STOP showing me the popular stuff on my homepage by default in the future?
I haven’t tried the new searching functionality yet, but the description of it on the “what’s new” page makes it sound an awful lot like the OLD searching functionality. And it still doesn’t seem to have the ability to filter things OUT by tags (If, say, I am looking for a puzzle game, but NOT Puzzle Platformer.).
Not real excited by the idea that they are now hiding “less popular” new releases from the former “New Releases” tab (now the “Popular New Releases”) because, once again, popular games are easy to discover.
Curator stuff could be interesting though - I’m looking forward to seeing what is done with that - and some of the UI changes sound promising, but I think this is a lot of hooplah about not a lot of real changes from my perspective.
I’m guessing there’s still a lot of fine tuning t be done. I like your idea of filtering by exclusion.
The curator feature is definitely a step it he right direction. Subbed to Total Buiscuits Page and RPS.
A “Recommended” section based on your recently ‘played’ games runs contrary to a system that essentially pays you to idle games you have no interest in (Steam trading cards).
Even if you take trading cards out of the picture this is a busted model.
To take two games that I have played a bunch of lately: Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky and FTL, if you asked me which one I would be more willing to buy another game that was like it, the answer would be LoH:ToS in a HEARTBEAT, because when I finish a game like that, I don’t go back and play it again. It’s basically done and I want more games like it. Whereas I can screw around with FTL virtually to infinity, so why do I need to buy more procedurally generated games?
But no, Steam is CONVINCED that since I have a lot of time logged in FTL and SotS: The Pit that what I really, really want is MORE procedurally generated pixel art roguelikes. Which is pretty much the OPPOSITE of what I want right now.
To be fair, that’s kind of asking a lot of an algorithm. And it’s still miles better than just about anything else I’m familiar with.
Right. These algorithms are crazy complex. Netflix recently shelled out a million bucks to a team that improved their predictive capabilities by just 10%, and I imagine movies are quite a bit simpler than games to predict.
I’m pretty surprised that Steam doesn’t already have a user-rating system in place, because they’re going to need a CRAPLOAD of that sort of data to come up with a useful algorithm.
Yep. The systems that feed on all the metadata should hopefully continue to improve as patterns are teased out of all that massive amount of information.
And again, it beats anything else in terms of gaming store fronts where it essentially boils down to: Did they pay us a lot of money? Is this an exclusive for our platform? OK, then to the top you go!
Yes it is, but…
Here I disagree. A “discoverability” algorithm that analyzes what I play and generates zero things I am interested in buying is, from my perspective, every bit as useless as a storefront that just puts all the “big names” on the “recommended” list (which, I should point out, Steam is ALSO doing. No, really, we think you’d like Stronghold 2, even though you’ve never played anything remotely like it, because it’s…popular!). Both methods generate no value for me, therefore, neither is any better or worse than the other because they are both equally worthless.
Unfortunately, I think this is a predictive challenge that computers just aren’t up for. At the very least, if they want this to work, people should be given the option to share some information about WHY they liked something. Me liking FTL and SotS: TP does NOT in fact mean that I like pixel art games particularly, it just means that I don’t NOT like Pixel Art games. And no algorithm is going to be able to figure that out on its own, so maybe you could, I dunno, ask me “What things about this game do you particularly like?” so that I can check off “Challenge” and “Discovery” and not “Pixel Art”.
This is almost certainly coming down the line. Steam’s metatagging is still in infancy, but they’re getting there.
Even once all the games are tagged, though, they’re going to need millions of datapoints from users answering those questions. Even if user-generated ratings went live today, we’re still looking at a long road before those ratings start providing useful data.
At least the UI now remembers what list and what part of said list we were looking at when clicking “Back”.
Hey, that’s a really serious improvement! Even if they should have had it years ago.
I don’t believe Steam has 100 million users, let alone 100 million unique users that have purchased a game in the last 30 days.
Sorry.
I don’t believe that either, since that’s not what the press release claims.
The claim is 100 million accounts which have at least one game and and have logged in the last 30 days. Not unique users. Not purchased a game in the last 30 days, though I see how you could have parsed that from the OP.
The definition of Active user is someone who has purchased a game and logged in within the past 30 days.
The number of total users/accounts that don’t necessarily fit the definition of active is about 200 million. Active users are probably a more useful metric, however.
Hopefully that clears things up.
Steam is a worldwide store/service and many games now require it. I can easily believe 100 million active accounts globally.
Their concurrent users went over 8 million recently too, didn’t it?
Cubsfan probably thinks it’s just 8 people in their basement with a million alts each, though, right Cubby?
Steam peaks at around 8 million logged in users. You don’t think that could translate into a revolving group of 100 million throughout a month? Or do you think the 8 million number is made up to?
Anyway, the new interface isn’t bad. I don’t like the new trend in flat UI design, but I don’t mind the super blueness.
One nice feature now is that you can follow games for news update feeds. That’s an obvious one they should’ve had for a while. I used to read the steam news feed, but once they had a bazillion games, it became too much. So now I can keep up with a few dozen games.
You can sort game searches better now, like if you go to the specials page, you can sort by release date, highest/lowest price, review score… but not the obvious one, discount percentage. And it tracks what page of the search you were on when you go back - which isn’t even a “hey, nice feature” but more of “how the fuck did you design it any other way” sort of thing.
Not sure about the recommendation system yet, but it does see I’m playing a lot of wasteland and recommends fallout tactics, which is a very good recommendation that wouldn’t be immediately apparent to most people since it’s an older game.
One goofiness is that it doesn’t understand complete editions versus base editions. I have 325 hours in Dragon Age Origins: Ultimate Edition so surely I’d be interested in Dragon Age Origins.
Well wouldn’t you?!