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If you've ever been curious about what Valve does exactly all day when nobody's watching, get ready to be at least slightly satiated. Valve unveiled Steam Labs, a new website featuring a range of experimental, discoverability-based features developed for potential use in its giant store. It's pretty interesting!
"Every year, Valve explains in his introduction to Steam Labs, we create dozens of experiences around discoverability, video, machine learning, etc. Do you know who we'd like to see them? Everybody". The idea, he says, is to allow users to "try, share and break" these experimental features, then give feedback directly to the developers who created them.
"We always try new things with Steam," says Valve, "but often only shares them with the world when they're ready to be part of the platform." Steam Labs allows us to share these ideas more early and improve them with your comments before making them official ".
Three "active experiences" are currently available for reading, and Valve notes that some "can look great." Of others, we can get rid of them.We hope that most will be improved with your feedback and will continue to be part of Steam. "
The first in the list is an experiment known as Micro Trailers, which, as its name implies, is capable of automatically transforming full trailers posted on a game's Steam page into six-second video clips. . At the present time, the implementation of Micro Trailers in Steam Labs is triggered when you hover over a game thumbnail page, linked to their store page. This is actually a fairly effective way to quickly get the first useful impressions of a game without going through a store page and through the current range of assets.
And it's an idea that has been greatly developed in the second experiment presented by Valve, Automatic Show. As you can imagine, this is a half-hour video synthesis generated by a machine games and games related events.
At the moment, nothing more than a series of clips of quick trailers (although Valve also includes a prototype with comments), but the idea of offering a summary more visual and automatically generated potential versions of games, and this is clearly a more effective way for customers to quickly digest what is proposed than to simply work their way one by one through a textual list of unknown titles. However, half an hour is probably excessive.
Finally, there is the interactive recommender, who, even at the beginning, is very good. With the help of machine learning, the recommended one generates a personalized list of games according to the playing time of other titles. A number of sliders and filters are then presented, allowing you to weight the results by popularity (from very popular to niche) or by date of publication. You can also choose to display only certain tags or not to omit them completely.
For me at least, it's the popularity filter that makes it the most interesting. As a person who spends a lot of time browsing Steam, I'm pretty used to seeing the same recommended games over and over again according to my playing habits. And it's refreshing to see a whole new handful of titles thanks to the "Niche" option, supposedly suited to my tastes, which have already slipped under my radar (or that of Steam).
Valve shared a little more information behind the scenes on Interactive Recommender on her official blog. It therefore seems reasonable to assume that he could be prepared to do the same for all Steam Labs experiments. It's certainly worth having fun if you're interested in this kind of thing, and we hope that these experiences can, in the future, help solve the notorious Steam discoverability problems.
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