New release of Steam Audio and the next Steam Labs project is up focused on game searching

Valve continue to improve Steam at quite a rapid pace lately. Recently, they not only released a new beta of Steam Audio but they also put up a new experiment.

For Steam Audio, Valve's cross-platform full-featured audio solution that integrates environment and listener simulation, it had the first Beta release in over a year on April 22. This pulled in better Android support, support for spatial blend in the binaural effect, support for custom distance attenuation and air absorption curves and plenty of fixes. They also updated their Unity and FMOD Studio plugins.

Onto Steam itself, the next Steam Labs experiment went up named 'Query Expansion' with an aim to improve search results when using tags. The point is to get tags to work in a more logical way, they said like how we would interpret them. Right now if you search for 3D and Platformer it will show games tagged with each but there's also the 3D Platformer tag that it would miss. Same again with RTS and Real-Time + Strategy tags, you end up missing results where games don't have all the relevant tags.

The aim is to combine together results more like how you would expect to give better game results. This helps with gaps in game tags, and Valve said this means developers won't need to go and load their game up with every possible related tag and become a mess. You can try it out here.