Steam is getting a new eight-week calendar feature for both games you’ve wishlisted and recommended games based on your previous playtime. No longer will you have to source recommendations by reading tea leaves, or visualise your wishlist by labelling different-shaped food in your fridge. Now, you’ll get a proper, personalised Monday-to-Friday chart that refreshes every day.
Why doesn’t the calendar cover weekends? Because Valve think most developers don’t release games at the weekend, and they want to avoid cluttering up the view with empty squares. Any calendar recommendations that do have the insolence to materialise on a Saturday or Sunday will appear in the following Monday box instead.
Valve have published a blog for this latest “Steam Labs Experiment”, explaining how the calendar’s recommendations functionality works. “This new calendar finds people with similar playtime profiles to you, and then looks at the games those players have been adding to their wishlist,” the platform holders write.
They add that trying out a bunch of games, as when panning the demo deluge during Next Fests, won’t affect your recommendations much, as the system is “more focused on games that you play the most (relative to other players), and spend most of your playtime in. So, a few minutes trying out a couple of new games or demos won’t have much impact on your recommendations, but sinking a bunch of time into a new favorite will.”
As for the daily calender refreshes, “in reality you aren’t likely to see your recommendations change all that much from day to day, but as time goes by you will obviously see new things pop up as the 8-week horizon of the calendar marches forward, or as games lock in their release dates.”
The calendar includes a round-up of already-released recommended games, covering the past week and the past month. These aren’t organised by day or date, as Valve don’t think you’re bothered about specifics once a game has launched. There are also filters for adjusting the number of games displayed, hiding owned games, and selecting them by tag. As with Steam’s upcoming feeds, the calendar also filters out games based on your wider content settings.
As ever, this kind of platform level adjustment could make a huge difference to the fortunes of any number of developers. Steam carries a vast quantity of games, and ‘discoverability’ is a perennial bugbear.
I’ve never been hugely impressed by Steam’s recommendation systems, which seem far too cautious. “Mayhap if you liked Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 you will like [consults notes, sweating] Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered?” I’ve also never really gotten along with calendars – paper ones have to be replaced, and digital ones have all this widgety bullshit in them. Still, the new all-in-one Steam calendars feel like an advance over filtering my wishlist.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
