author: Barth Faryna
Success of Steam's Interactive Recommender
Interactive game recommendations on Steam turned out to be a great success and resulted in a very positive response from the community. Valve follows through and introduces new features that will allow players to search for new titles in more detail.
A few weeks ago, Valve launched Steam Labs. This is an initiative that allows users to test new features that the company is working on. Among them was Interactive Recommender, which has already turned out to be a considerable success. It's perfomance resulted in as many as 10,000 new titles added to the players' wishlists via the recommendations page. Valve decided to further improve the new system and added some new features to it.
Interactive Recommender is a tool that analyzes users' game libraries, checks how much time they devoted to particular titles and on this basis prepares a whole list of recommended productions. This is a completely new solution, because the previous recommendations were based only on simple tags, which did not always result in accurate proposals.
The success of the tool led Valve to developing further improvements of its new system and adding a few additional features. Now that you move your mouse over the games in the left column, you will see their title, and when you click on them, you will immediately be taken to Steam Store.
In addition, players have the option to exclude individual productions they have previously played, so that the tool does not take them into account when preparing the list of recommendations. We can freely experiment and eliminate selected titles, watching how the list drawn up for us changes.
Valve is of course fully aware of the fact that the success of the recommendation system may result from a simple fact: it is a novelty, and novelties are always very popular. That's why it's not entirely clear whether users liked the feature so much or whether they're using it to get to know its features, and then they'll abandon it and don't look back. This, however won't be known for another couple of months.
On the occasion of the release of Steam Labs, Valve also introduced several other interesting options. One of them is the Automatic Show. This is a thirty-minute compilation of short game clips, generated automatically by an algorithm. Users pointed out that 30 minutes is a very long time and nobody wants to see such a long "teaser". In connection with this, Valve has also prepared several shorter video clips: Top Releases, VR Show, and Rapid Fire Horror.
Valve has also announced that it plans to introduce a more dynamic tag management system in interactive recommendations. This is a feature that many users have asked for. Additionally, the studio ensured that it will continue to improve the new system to make it even more helpful and better match the recommended games.