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 bias inspection 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

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.

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.

Wait, does Steam not already do this kind of thing? I absolutely see different games marketed towards me based on what I’ve been playing more of lately, and have for years.

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.

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.