[QUOTE]Whenever we announce a change to the Steam Store, we're always really interested to read the discussions that follow. Obviously we see a wide range of opinions on how good a job the Store is doing, but increasingly we're seeing that people have very different ideas of what its job even is - and what it should be.
That's understandable. One of the reasons it's so hard to make a good store - one of the reasons we've been working on it for years, and one of the reasons we think we still have years of work left to do - is that it has so many jobs. It has to serve so many players whose tastes and interests are not only different, but sometimes complete opposites.
So we thought it would be useful to define what we believe success would be for the Steam Store. That way, everyone would understand what we're trying to do, and discussions could focus on what we're trying to do separately from whether or not we're doing it well enough. This distinction also helped us realize we should be collaborating more directly with the community around improving the Steam Store.
This blog post aims to start that process by being the first in a set of three that explains our thinking around the Steam Store, and our plans for how we'll improve it with Steam Direct. We're going to talk about Store's goals, and how it executes them. In the second post, we'll cover some ways the Store is being exploited, and some changes we're making to address that. Finally, in the third we'll talk about the Steam Direct publishing fee, and some features that we'll be releasing in the coming weeks.
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So what would a successful Steam Store look like? To answer that, we need to look at all the different kinds of people who use it.
Players who are highly connected to the online game community & conversations, and players who are totally unconnected
Players who browse the store looking for a game, and players who arrive already knowing the title they're looking for
Players who come to the store once a month, and players who visit multiple times a day
Players who just want to buy the latest AAA title, and players who want to search for hidden gems
Players who want to play titles earlier in their development, and get involved in their evolution
Players who want games with specific attributes, such as a type of gameplay, support for a specific technology, translation to their local language, etc
Developers with AAA titles that have large, existing fan bases, and developers who are barely known, yet have a game that would be a hit if players found it
Developers who want to build deliberately niche games, and have them find that niche audience
Developers who want to get community feedback earlier in the development process
We believe that a successful store would be one that treated all these people, both players and developers, in a manner that they would consider fair. Unfortunately, these groups often have competing interests, so it's important to understand that if we're not doing exactly what one group wants, it's probably because we're trying to weigh it against another group's interests. It might seem obvious that developers have some competing interests, but it's also true on the player side - some players specifically enjoy exploring Early Access titles, while others never want to see them.
And ultimately, that is why the Steam Store is a design challenge. We could make the problem a lot simpler by choosing to ignore some set of players or developers, but we think there are already stores that have chosen to do that, and it's much more interesting to try and figure out how to build a single store that works for everyone.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE][B]Exposing the Store's inner-workings[/B]
The algorithm behind the Store that's tasked with achieving the goals we've described above ultimately ends up producing this: the games you see when you load up the Store.
The Store is constantly trying to balance all the different interested groups of players and developers. It knows that it has a limited number of spaces it can use to show games to a player. It has some knowledge of the player, if the player is logged in and has a purchase / play history. It has some knowledge of the game, based on what the developer has told it and what previous purchasers of the game have said & done. It chews on all that data, and finally, decides which games it should show the player in all the various sections of the Store.
The problem with black box algorithms like this is that it's hard to know when they aren't working as intended. Did we not show a game to a player because the algorithm correctly guessed that the player wouldn't be interested in it? Or because there were other games it thought the player would be more interested in? Or just because of a bug?
We had similar problems in the Dota 2 matchmaking system, which was also a black box algorithm. We found that when we better exposed the data around the black box (in that case, the matchmaking ranks of the players), our players understood the black box better, and as a result, were able to better identify cases where it wasn't working correctly.
So we're going to do the same with the Steam Store. We want to show you more of what it's doing and why - and we have some features planned to help with this, starting with one we're launching today: an algorithm section on game pages that states why the Store thinks this game will (or will not) be interesting to you.
[IMG]http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/27766192/9e407a012b5e1a7d240dc0ae83bf8735abd14bdc.png[/IMG]
This section will let you see inside the black box, and understand what the Store is thinking. We hope it will be useful whenever you're exploring the Store, but in particular, whenever you've navigated from an external web page directly to a specific game's Store page. In those cases, this section will help you understand whether or not this game is something the Store would recommend to you. In other cases, you might be more or less interested in something the store recommends if you know exactly why it's recommending it. For instance, knowing that a particular friend or curator likes or dislikes a game might make it clearer whether you'd like it. Finally, if the store recommends something you know you're not interested in, you'll be able to see where its decision making is going wrong, and tell us about it.[/QUOTE]
[URL]http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1301948399257707760[/URL]
thx mr valve
now announce that new ui and some games
Went to test the feature, instantly recommended a game which requires a Virtual Reality Headset. I'm happy that you want to recommend me a zombie game steam, but if I can't play it don't recommend me. Looking up my time on Virtual Reality games should surely be able to tell you that I don't have such a headset.
Is there a way to disable games that fit into a particular category yet?
[QUOTE=Nathan776;52203401]Went to test the feature, instantly recommended a game which requires a Virtual Reality Headset. I'm happy that you want to recommend me a zombie game steam, but if I can't play it don't recommend me. Looking up my time on Virtual Reality games should surely be able to tell you that I don't have such a headset.
Is there a way to disable games that fit into a particular category yet?[/QUOTE]
intentional -- they think you might like that game and it might convince you to buy a headset (vive).
This kinda thing is particularly exciting for me as a developer who's making his first game. I've been doing a survey and over 50% of the people playing the demo of the game have found the game via Steam, rather than my trailers on YouTube or my outreach on social media, which says a lot about how Steam travels the info of the game, so this'll be interesting come release time.
Hopefully this also puts a lot more confidence in Steam as a platform again.
[QUOTE=Nathan776;52203401]Went to test the feature, instantly recommended a game which requires a Virtual Reality Headset. I'm happy that you want to recommend me a zombie game steam, but if I can't play it don't recommend me. Looking up my time on Virtual Reality games should surely be able to tell you that I don't have such a headset.
Is there a way to disable games that fit into a particular category yet?[/QUOTE]
[IMG]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/sxrakvdbeyt4i2u/Steam_2017-05-08_22-53-57.png[/IMG]
[QUOTE=Wowza!;52204142][IMG]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/sxrakvdbeyt4i2u/Steam_2017-05-08_22-53-57.png[/IMG][/QUOTE]
Thank You :) I Could of sworn that I heard about the feature before but struggled to ever find it. No More VR Titles Showing up for me.
[QUOTE=Nathan776;52204175]Thank You :) I Could of sworn that I heard about the feature before but struggled to ever find it. No More VR Titles Showing up for me.[/QUOTE]
Don't worry about it, it took me forever to find those damn options. I had to look it up and I still couldn't find it for quite a bit.
The shit that annoys me with the steam store the most is the huge amount of greenlight trash that clutters it
[QUOTE=Araknid;52204412]The shit that annoys me with the steam store the most is the huge amount of greenlight trash that clutters it[/QUOTE]
thankfully Valve knows about it and in fact is trying to solve it
I think the only major issue I have with Steam right now is that its recommendations are either too broad, or are cluttered with trash.
Just because I played a fighting game with the "Anime" tag doesn't mean I want to play a Visual Novel. Just because I recently played Rust doesn't mean I want to check out one of the hundreds of shitty "MUH FIRST SURVIVAL GAEMS/ASSET FLIPS"
I also kind of miss seeing titles on the front page on their release dates. Want to play the newest game that everyone is raving about? Well, look it up in the search engine you dolt, because we'd rather show you games that are a few years old or are trash instead.
I hope Valve really does start cutting down on the trash that flowed in with Greenlight, but as long as they give people an easy in and don't have an actual human who works for Valve curating content, we're still going to get trash games. I understand the benefits of a system like Greenlight to indie developers, but you can't just have the doors open all the time.
I really hope that Steam Direct is more than just a potential hike in price to get your game on the platform. Scammers didn't mind paying the $100 to put their game up via Greenlight due to making back on it easily, so I'm sure they still wouldn't mind doing the same with a higher price.
[QUOTE=Araknid;52204412]The shit that annoys me with the steam store the most is the huge amount of greenlight trash that clutters it[/QUOTE]
It's so awful, back in the day I really liked browsing the store for more hidden gems and unkown games. These days it's absolutely atrocious to browse through the pages to get some decent games.
There are to many pages and games around, I don't want to browse throught the same million shit rpg maker games or other awful software. Some of these seem to be nearly always on sale and it's hard to get the good deals.
Furthermore the filtering is just awful and the tag system can be misleading. I looked for strategy titles, mostly rts games and it showed me CS:GO and the new Fallout games.
Back in the day, when you pressed the strategy tab you got strategy games. Now its cluttered with diffrent shit that have strategic elements, but should not really be there. I swear ive seen call of duty in the strategy tab.
[QUOTE=Jelman;52203320]thx mr valve
now announce that new ui and some games[/QUOTE]
New Steam Beta actually has some references to the clientui "leaks" that happened in February.
[QUOTE=Marlamin;52205530]New Steam Beta actually has some references to the clientui "leaks" that happened in February.[/QUOTE]
Nice, at least its still being worked on.
Mind linking the references? Im curious
[QUOTE=Jelman;52205561]Nice, at least its still being worked on.
Mind linking the references? Im curious[/QUOTE]
[url]https://github.com/SteamDatabase/SteamTracking/commit/a29a924863e8e36c080411a0f094968aa6f36925.diff[/url] (full beta diff, be warned)
ctrl-f clientui
Nothing but a command line switch and 1-2 other references, but they're definitely messing with getting it working.
The UI definitely needs a upgrade, the amount of space that is either filled by useless crap or left unused annoys me to no end, especially how we are slowly moving towards 4K.
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