After about a year of Steam Labs now being a thing, Valve have written up a blog post to celebrate and to go over what's shipped, what's not happening and more.
Steam Labs is the new area of Steam where Valve put up various experimental features, sometimes made with external developers, to attempt to improve Steam as a whole. We've seen upgrades to Steam's searching tools for finding games, which has been great to see more filters like price and excluding games already owned. Then there's Play Next to give you options from your big Steam Library to go through, the Interactive Recommended and more.
They've now announced that Community Recommendations has officially shipped as part of Steam, giving you ideas to play based on recent reviews. I was told by Valve press on this, that it should be getting patched to respect your Platform Preferences (bottom here) to only show games from operating systems ticked.
I've already seen quite a few interesting Linux titles thanks to Community Recommendations so it definitely works.
They've also announced some experiments were shelved including the automatically generated video show of games and the Deep Dive experiment where you click through games and it gives you similar games. A shame as they were both quite good ideas but the Deep Dive experiment at least led to improvements in how they handle game tags.
As for what's in progress: the News & Events Hub had a slight UI refresh, continued improvements to tag searching, Micro Trailers are live across many parts of Steam but it will come to more areas and they're also working on new ways to discover content on Steam.
With how big Steam is thanks to thousands of games releasing per year, Steam itself just continues expanding what's possible from a store. Well, it's been a long time since Steam has just been a store. It's a huge blend of things now. I'm happy about this, Valve constantly trying to push things forward and experiment helps to keep PC gaming fun and interesting.
They've now announced that Community Recommendations has officially shipped as part of Steam, giving you ideas to play based on recent reviews. I was told by Valve press on this, that it should be getting patched to respect your Platform Preferences (bottom here) to only show games from operating systems ticked.
I just tried it and I had only recommendations that actually are available for Linux.
They've now announced that Community Recommendations has officially shipped as part of Steam, giving you ideas to play based on recent reviews. I was told by Valve press on this, that it should be getting patched to respect your Platform Preferences (bottom here) to only show games from operating systems ticked.
I just tried it and I had only recommendations that actually are available for Linux.
I also only get Linux recommendations in the community recommendations list. The more interesting interactive recommender, however, still shows me a a ton of Windows games though.
It looks like there are three widgets to go. "Players like you like love" shows Windows games (I had bit of bad luck and all of the recommended games were Windows only).
"Because you played" is also riddled with Windows games. With this one it's bit of a shame that Deep Dive is gone as it's able to show quite large selection of similar games, even split between popular and niche categories.
Of course when next sale comes, all nicely filtered stuff is going to be replaced with event specific stuff.
Quite lot of stuff to ignore if I would shop just based on the Steam store front page.
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