Steam's new discoverability update makes it easier to find games you're more likely to play
Steam's various recommendation pages and sections should now serve more accurate, interesting results to customers.
As part of Valve's ongoing work to improve discoverability on Steam, the company rolled out a new update to the store. The goal of this update is to make the main Recommendation Feed more precise.
This also includes similar sections like More Like This (on store pages) and Recommended For You (on the homepage). Valve said the old system was biased towards the most popular games, and wasn't really personalised.
A set of tweaks to the parameters that dictate the games players see, along with a few bug fixes, were quietly implemented - but only for 5% of Steam's customers. This allowed Valve to monitor accurate data, and the results are positive.
Those who unknowingly took part in the experiment were found to be 15% more likely to click on games shown in the recommendation sections. More specifically, the Recommended For You section saw a 75% increase in the number of unique games visited, and a 48% increase in average visits per game.
Likewise, tag pages and More Like This saw an uptick in the number of players who wishlist and purchase the games they spotted there. All of these changes have now been rolled out for everyone, so you should start seeing more games you didn't know about, but are likely to enjoy, all across Steam.
This is all seperate from Valve's Steam Labs experiments, which produced things such as interactive recommendation.