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Valve aren't just rolling out more experimental features in the Steam Lab, they're also taking a stab at improving how Steam recommends games to you with some adjustments now live.

In the developer-focused blog post on Steam, the "Store Discovery Update" is out with what they say are "several algorithmic changes and bug fixes" in an effort to be more "precise" and "diverse" in what users see in the Recommendation Feed, More Like This and Recommended for You store sections. If you don't know them, it's these bits:

One of the main problems seemed to be the most popular games driving these sections, Valve claims this happened with the "Similar by Tags" section and it was a bug they've since fixed. There's lots of other little bug fixes and changes done, which has also resulted in the "Recommended for You" section also now being less biased towards the most popular titles.

It seems they ran a bit of an experiment with around 5% of users sneakily being tested. As a result of those tests, Valve decided it was working a lot better. They showed the below chart which shows how big the difference was with their tweaks and bug fixes for the "Recommended For You" section:

So a 75% increase in the total number of unique games visited, plus a 48% increase in the average visits per game. Pretty great odds that.

Valve also said they saw more purchases and wishlisting being done from places driven by Tags, like the "More Like This" section as a result of them now showing a better selection.

Hopefully now, the same games won't appear all the time that I simply don't click on. It will be interesting to see what developers say about this when it's been live for a few weeks, as our Twitter feed is constantly full of game developers talking about how Steam hits and revenue is down constantly.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Steam, Update, Valve
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Eike Sep 13, 2019
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Quoting: LungDragoSome engines run like crap on Linux/Proton and there's little the game developers can do about it. So, as a Linux consumer, I might want to filter those out.
That's not an engine, though, and you already can filter them out (might be subject to change when Proton leaves beta).


Last edited by Eike on 13 September 2019 at 2:21 pm UTC
LungDrago Sep 13, 2019
Quoting: Eike
Quoting: LungDragoSome engines run like crap on Linux/Proton and there's little the game developers can do about it. So, as a Linux consumer, I might want to filter those out.
That's not an engine, though, and you already can filter them out (might be subject to change when Proton leaves beta).

What's not an engine? I'm not sure how many of such games are on Steam but afaik games in VNMaker, which is quite new, don't run on Linux at all, as an example.
geekening Sep 13, 2019
Quoting: EikeWell, I do. What's missing in your opinion and what would you make of it?

Quoting: Liam DaweI'm not sure either how it was confusing.

i just said it was useless. there is no point in representing the +75% with an arbitrarily sized bar and nothing to compare it to . i can say 'today i ate 10 more pies than yesterday' and show you this



or i could show you this one



what do any of those really do for you ? or i could just show you nothing and you still know that i ate 10 more pies than yesterday.
Liam Dawe Sep 13, 2019
Okay, I can understand your point a little more now. However, given what they're talking about it was clear enough. They were just using a simple chart to make the point stand out tis all.
Eike Sep 13, 2019
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Quoting: LungDrago
Quoting: Eike
Quoting: LungDragoSome engines run like crap on Linux/Proton and there's little the game developers can do about it. So, as a Linux consumer, I might want to filter those out.
That's not an engine, though, and you already can filter them out (might be subject to change when Proton leaves beta).

What's not an engine? I'm not sure how many of such games are on Steam but afaik games in VNMaker, which is quite new, don't run on Linux at all, as an example.

My fault. Thought you were taking about Proton
Beamboom Sep 13, 2019
Quoting: LungDragoSome engines run like crap on Linux/Proton
Examples?
dilly Sep 14, 2019
Looking at the comments (on the Steam official post) and my early graphs (I'm a dev), looks like the "more like this" section is WAY worse now... :(


Last edited by dilly on 14 September 2019 at 12:48 pm UTC
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