Steam will now show you more games that you could actually want to buy

Epic Games Store is attracting some smaller developers out of Steam, but Valve just made changes in the background that could prevent others from jumping from one ship to another – and could put more of their games in front of the players who really want to buy them.

While players probably already know how to search for popular titles like Gears 5 and no need for this advice, Valve admits that smaller games have not been promoted as often. He now plans to bring more small games and fewer popular games into his stream of recommendations.

Valve says the bugs were partly responsible for this problem:

Previously, when customers searched for games by browsing the recommendation line at the bottom of the home page or in the "More like this" sections, they did not see as many different games as we would have liked . In addition, we received many reactions that "Recommended for you" felt too biased in favor of the most popular games and did not feel very personalized. We wanted to determine how to respond to these comments, so we went looking for bugs and decided to start an experiment.

We found bugs, such as the "Tag-Like" section of the recommendation bulletin, which included a bug stating that the top-rated games (a category that does not change very often) generated too much of what the players had seen. We changed that. We also found that, in some cases, our time scale used to calculate popularity was too narrow, making the unpredictability of some games unpredictable. We have therefore expanded the period of time used in these calculations.

It seems that these changes are not of personal interest to retain developers. By testing the new changes with 5% of its users, Valve found that the players had really followed the new recommendations they had received. Users were apparently more likely to click on it, and Valve said they saw more games purchased and wish list. The test results were convincing enough for Valve to implement the changes for everyone.

If these recommendation changes work as expected, players might be happy to be exposed to more games they did not know, in addition to what they might already see on the homepage. from the Steam store. The recommendations could also be winners for small developers: if they help sell more games, as experience has shown, these developers might not be so excited about switching to another platform -form.

The clutter Steam is only one of the reasons why these developers have subscribed to new platforms as popular as Epic Games Store and Apple Arcade. They also offered developers an infusion of money and talent, in exchange for exclusivities.

By the way, this is not the only recent Valve effort towards better discoverability: he's been working on experimental tools such as the Interactive Learning Machine-based Recommender and a tool called Deep Dive that allows you to bump about the game information until you find one that you like. .