Valve has been in the Steam Labs workshop for a year and is now preparing ways for people to spend money more efficiently in their store. Some experiments have failed, others have received the seal of approval and have been submitted as complete features. The community recommendations by which you can see the opinions of users of all kinds of people you do not know, are graduating today. However, the valves are far from over, with more experiments planned for Labs’ next year.
For a company that really loves to solve problems by throwing data at them and machine learning, the Community Recommendations are interesting. Steam seems to prioritize reviews based on how many other users vote them “useful,” meaning they could be positive or negative. Recommendations will now display on the Steam home page, but you can go to the community Recommendations home page to specify how recent a review should be, if the game is owned by you or is on your wish list, and how many hours does the critic have to have played
Right now, one particular person recommends a lot of reviews to me who, after examining their review history, have reviewed dozens of games in their library in the last 24 hours. I am sure they are all very well thought out. You may want to wait for the water to settle on community recommendations for a greater variety of opinions.
Amusingly, people tend to ramble on at the beginning of their comments. Heck, I tend to digress early in the reviews. However, Steam doesn’t really care about that when it gives you a snippet of a user review on the recommendations page.
You will get gems like “My feelings for this game are a bit complicated. If you want a tl; dr just read the last paragraph. If you want to know my personal thoughts as someone who 100% this game, give the rest a read.” Apparently, others 173 users found this Lobotomy Corporation review helpful, though I bet that’s not the helpful part The rest of the review is a click away, of course I’m just being grumpy.
Oh, here is one for Battlefield 3 that literally starts with the words “Tutorial: Don’t Review”, but people rated it as helpful, so I’m assuming it’s a review.
My personal favorite so far is this review of Divinity: Original Sin 2’s “The Dunbar Beam”: “Teleport 30 corpses to the boss room, then launching” mass corpse blast “to instantly kill the boss is a perfectly valid way of playing the game. ” Now that is a review. Without editions.
As for the future of Steam Labs, Valve has more projects in the works. They continue to work on the News Hub to help you keep track of news and upcoming in-game events. As mentioned earlier, they continue to make gender tags easier to use as a search tool. Micro trailers are also being manipulated to help you get a feel for a game at a glance. In the future, they plan to add Steam Curators news that you follow to that News Hub.
You can find feedback from the big happy family that is the Steam community pinned to the fridge, that’s the home page, starting today. Of course, other Steam Labs experiments in progress are still relegated to their own separate page.
You can read a little more, including information on the experiments Valve has archived this year, in its news post.
