Valve’s rolled out a new discoverability-helping feature on Steam and, based on a few moments with it, it’s already a big help.
The idea is a Steam Personal Calendar which shows you, at a glance, and in calendar form, a selection of games coming out that you might be interested in. To determine which games these are, Steam looks at what you’ve already played, a lot, and makes suggestions based upon it.
The top blocks in the Personal Calendar show presumed-interesting games released in the last month and then in the last seven days. Then below, and this is the bit I like, you see games yet to come out presented in a calendar view – as though you drew them in the day-blocks of your Tolkien calendar that’s pinned to your noticeboard. (It’s a nice Tolkien calendar I’ll have you know.)
I find this layout really useful for getting a quick and clear dose of information about what’s on its way, and it’s easy to mouse-over a game’s art and watch a video of it if you don’t already know what a game’s about. You can also customise the page using a few filtering options if you like.
A quick word on the algorithm powering it: “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,” Valve explained in an announcement post.
And: “This recommendation system gets re-trained daily to incorporate the latest data. 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 eight-week horizon of the calendar marches forward, or as games lock in their release dates.”
This Personal Calendar is still considered an experiment, by the way – one of the Steam Labs experiments pursued to help tidy up the store – so it could yet change.
The Personal Calendar arrives after another recent Steam presentational overhaul, which removed the cluttered navigation menu from the left-hand side of the Store and nestled it, in a newly thoughtout form, in a drop-down menu across the top. This not only removes a lot of visual busyness but also means navigation options follow you around Steam whichever page you happen to be on, which wasn’t always the case before.
