I love the recommender experiment with a "popular-niche" slider. I want this slider almost everywhere when not searching for a very specific thing I'm already aware of. It was a great feature in last.fm, and I miss it in other streaming platforms.
This is especially useful in something like steam, where you get the front page full of suggestions... that you've likely already seen many times, or heard about because everybody played them. I can't find anything interesting on the normal recommendations, but after going 100% niche I've added 3 games (from 2014-2016) to my wishlist.
As soon as you start going more to the niche side, it gets super specific. My day jobs is RTL design, doing digital circuits, and my top 1 niche recommendation is MHRD, "a game in which you design various hardware circuits in a hardware description language."
MHRD is pretty fun. The implementation is a little janky (it's written in Java, the interface isn't accelerated, the leaderboards are a little broken), but as a game it's basically "starting with a NAND gate, build a processor from scratch, using components you've built in earlier levels". Honestly, for me, it was like a refresher of the 6 month processor design course I did in my CS degree 20 years ago.
You might find it a little simplistic given your day job, but for anyone else reading, I found it really fun.
Side note: If you like MHRD and want something a little less real world and a little more video gamey, try TIS-100, which might be the single best game on Steam.
Agreed, cant even count the amount of times I have searched for $VERY_SPECIFIC_THING on Google, but got 10 pages of completely irrelevant references to something that has close to matching keywords and is way more popular.
at some point they removed the "show users link he clicked before" and that makes the start of Google usefulness. you used to get Wikipedia and stack overflow reliably on top in 2014, then by 2015 it stopped, where by Google choice of by content farm Henning better at gaming the system idk, but the key was removing history from result bias
still cant separate out co-op story from co-op because of multiplayer :-/
Why is it so hard to find story co-op games... always MMORPGs, RTSs, or sandbox games. Battleblock theater and pit people were fantastic co-op games.. and stuff like Halo's co-op campaign was great :-/
One of my favorite games is “Nuclear Throne Together”, although it is quite hard, and more players make it much harder.
A current good and accessible one is “Vectronom”, a very stylized rhythm game where you play as cubes moving through levels morphing to electronic beats.
Mainstream games Rayman and Overcooked are also very good and fun and instantly accessible even to “non-gamers”.
Another one I discovered which is quite fun is “Hidden In Plain Sight”, where all players look like NPCs and most modes revolve around figuring out who is a player and who is CPU. It can be really intense because of the psychological terror.
“Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime” is fun but gets tedious because of the huge levels.
Most of those those don’t have mich of a story though, except maybe Rayman. But that doesn’t detract from the games being fun.
Also, Divinity Original Sin 2, Towerfall Ascension, Giana Sisters, XCOM, Sniper Elite (enjoyed single player, and it has a coop mode that I've never tried).
It's bizarre that the digital stores of multi-billion dollar corporations still can't seem able to get discovery down perfectly.
Steam seems better off than the rest, and I can't comment on Google Play or Xbox Marketplace but on the App Store, Nintendo eShop and PlayStation Store, it's still hard to discover what you're looking for if you don't already know about it.
For example, all RPG games like Baldur's Gate, or platformers in a pixel-art style with chiptune music. The best way that I know of for discovering all such games is to search for a name that I already know, and look in the Similar or "Also Bought" list on its product page. Of course even then their algorithms don't list all relevant games and are often swamped with microtransaction-loaded crapware/copycats.
YouTube suffers from the same sickness, and Google Search itself has been dumbed down over the past few years.
Is it deliberate? Are they afraid that rivals and "researchers" will get too much information about their business if their search and filter functionality was "too" powerful, or that users might leave sooner after they get exactly what they came for?
(I know I can use third-party sites like itch.io to discover games, but this is about the app stores' built-in functionality.)
I can't comment on Google Play or Xbox Marketplace but on the App Store, Nintendo eShop and PlayStation Store, it's still hard to discover what you're looking for if you don't already know about it
Over at /r/androiddev, it used to be a regular occurrence for people to post baffled questions like, "I published my app 'Llamas go Picnicking' and I can't find it listed even if I search exactly for 'Llamas go Picnicking'".
Indeed, you'd go and search for 'Llamas go Picknicking' and see Angry Birds at the top.
It's not in the interest of the stores to let you efficiently find just what you need - this would deprive them of revenue from errors and impulsive purchases, and would reduce the time you're spending in store, exposed to various form of advertising.
Stores are not a good product discovery mechanism.
That's true in retail where they want you wandering the aisles but it doesn't translate well to digital store fronts because of the way they're organized.
In a retail shop you have broad categories like desserts or women's hygiene and a product has a 1:1 relationship with that category. People shop based on categories and can easily skip irrelevant ones (how often are you wandering the toilet paper aisle looking for cheese?).
Digital stores allow products to exist in multiple genre concurrently and are featured virtually based on popularity or advertising dollars. So it's entirely possible to see the same game in every genre because it's being spammed at you or contains poorly conceived elements from those genre.
Generally filtering by multiple genres results in full outer joins instead of inner joins so they're effectively useless.
I was going to say amazon is pretty good at letting you find stuff...
Then I realized actual search results are manipulated by competing brands, and then when the results are displayed, they are crowded out by sponsored results.
Additionally, I thought about netflix and amazon prime videos.
In netflix you're in the browser, looking for your next show ot watch and never quite finding it, but you're trapped. Many times I've run out of time and not watched anything.
and when I first used amazon prime videos, they had better searching and filtering than netflix. And I immediately found that the scifi movies in the library that I had not watched were all like 2-star and below, and quit early, not watching anything.
I've worked with dozens of online retailers, none thought they would get more sales by intentionally creating errors than trying to put what the customer wanted in front them. It is just hard to get right.
In some cases, like Netflix, an effective search/discovery mechanism would mainly serve to highlight how limited the available catalog is. That's not an issue for Steam, of course, but it's definitely a glaringly-obvious motivation elsewhere.
I find it tries to map out genres too specifically. Usually my recommendations feel like hey you like this artist, here are artists that do the exact same thing but worse.
I find I get excellent recommendations from Youtube. Go on without logging into an account. Pick an album you like and look at the related videos. They usually aren't specifically in the same genre but I've come across a lot of albums that have since become favorites this way.
Great that they're experimenting with content discovery mechanisms. Unfortuntely, with these micro trailers they seem to be going the same route as Netflix: enticing people with flashiness alone.
I think most people will go to the reviews section or an aggregator website like Metacritic before they purchase a game. Why not include that information up front along side the flashy visuals? Surely that would reward talented developers while giving users the best possible experience.
I like the idea of having metacritic and more review-oriented info upfront near games. There's currently a few browser extensions that solve these issues. Valve would benefit from reaching out to these developers and implementing some of these features directly into the storefront. [ although, I get that it's a balance of keeping it feature-full + lightweight ]
Yeah, Steam does a good job at the moment of including user and professional reviews on the game pages. The fact they let you sort and filter game searches by average review is great. Also, the tools to track changes in reviews over time is really useful to see how early access games are changing during development.
> We're always trying new things with Steam, but often only share them with the world when they're ready to be made a part of the platform. Steam Labs allows us to share these ideas earlier
...Steam has just entered the fabled early access phase :O
lol, for real this seem neat. In regards to the current 3 experiments:
MICRO-TRAILERS] this is a cool idea, I like when YouTube implemented a similar concept. My only hesitation with this, though, is it appears to just grab from a random point in the game trailer. The thing I don't like about some of the game's trailers I visit is it takes so long to show any real gameplay or, worse of all, shows no gameplay at all.
A novel, yet to be fair tough to manage, alternative would be to allow users to submit recorded gameplay clips, and have the community vote on the best "representative" clips, and show those instead.
My personally favorite is the 2x2 grid for curators.
INTERACTIVE RECOMMENDER] this is dope. I love this. It probably won't become my default way to discover, but I can easily see myself using this either once a week, or whenever I feel like spending some money. As a Linux user, I'd like the ability to filter by OS, but otherwise this is, again, dope.
AUTOMATIC SHOW] I like the base concept, but I can't see myself sitting through 30 minutes of its current iteration. The mockup video with the voiceover definitely is more appealing to me, I'm excited to see with how they progress with robotic voice over. Honestly, even if the robo-voice sounds stilted and odd, I think that could add to the charm. Don't try to act like a real human is behind the videos, embrace the concept of a robot tirelessly producing these daily [ or weekly / whatever ] videos. Sorta like a Toonami vibe. Tom was awesome!
Also, it'd be nice to split the videos into separate entities. One video for overall games, one video showcasing strategy, etc. Having to skip around in a 30 minute video to find the parts I care about is needless. Either split them up & let me choose, or develop an easy-to-use playback controller that lets me auto-skip to the parts that I'd be interested in. Like scene-selection on DVDs.
I don't get why steam doesn't implement GameSpy like features. That is, a common lobby that list (and allow you to join) public multiplayer sessions for all steam games that you own.
It would make it possible to revive quite a few of those "dead" niche multiplayer games. And greatly engage the steam users around the steam games.
Steam does have that - kind of. There's a "servers" window, which you can open from the View menu. It lists multiplayer servers for lots of different games - mostly Source engine games like CS:GO and Team Fortress 2, but also games with Steam matchmaking like ARMA2/3.
A lot of games are passionate creations and the creators would happily put a few hours in to report info to Steam servers if they thought it would double multiplayer use for another year or so at the end of a game's life.
It's the franchises which consider games dead after dropping the sequel, ie Call of Duty, FIFA etc. They want people to buy the next version every year regardless of whether the game is actually better enough to justify the cost.
The recommendations is pretty good but it is limited because a lot of the games it recommended me were games that I had bought through GOG, Epic, or other places. If it could pick up that I have a game on other stores it would be more useful.
Yeah, maybe a third of them did I play elsewhere. But I consider this a signal on how good the commender already is.
Don't think there is a good way for steam to pick that up automatically without it being a privacy nightmare. An "I played that" button would be nice, help steam improve/validate recommendations and might even be used to advertise new content / sequels / etc.
Since we're talking about Steam... is there any way to check _in my library_: which ones are RPG, which ones are 3D and visually stunning (I just bought a fancy card and want to test drive)? API is fine.
To avoid the hassle of categorising games manually, I've been using https://github.com/Depressurizer/Depressurizer
It took me a couple of tries to get a functioning setup with an older version, but it's working now and they seem to have improved the UI a bit. It allows automatically making categories in your library based on genres and user-defined tags from steam as well as some other things like ratings and time to beat
They teased an update for the Steam library recently, I think better filtering functionality is part of it. Not sure when it's coming out though, but since it's Valve time, you never know anyways.
It won't work for everything (for example, I don't think it'll help with "visually stunning"), but it works well for finding games of particular genres, ones with local co-op multiplayer, and so on.
It's pretty rough, but lets you filter your games based on the user tags on each game. You can also filter games between multiple accounts at the same time, which was the main feature of the original version.
Sorting by recommended system requirements would be pretty cool.
Library listings for games could definitely benefit from the addition of genre/category tags. It's annoying having to go to the store page to check what kind of game it is.
This is especially useful in something like steam, where you get the front page full of suggestions... that you've likely already seen many times, or heard about because everybody played them. I can't find anything interesting on the normal recommendations, but after going 100% niche I've added 3 games (from 2014-2016) to my wishlist.