Do any game storefronts do discovery well?

It keeps coming up in a few contexts and it's a topic of great interest to those affected by poor discovery so Im curious about what works for you folks when you're browsing some digital storefront for a new game.

The same complaint comes up over and over again, about Steam, about the iOS app store, about Google Play, about the Nintendo eShop (on Switch). There's too much content out there and even users with wallet in hand can't find something new to try. I define the 'discovery' problem as that:

I want to learn about a new game that might interest me, but I have to do it outside of a store

Is there a storefront that's working well for you in the 'discovery' department?

No.

I hate to give such a terse response, but that's the whole of it: no one is doing this well. Some are worse than others, but everything drowns under the sheer volume of content.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

No.

I hate to give such a terse response, but that's the whole of it: no one is doing this well. Some are worse than others, but everything drowns under the sheer volume of content.

Clock's right, but there are some features that I find extremely useful for discovery:

• A feed showing friend’s purchases. This is great both on an individual level, because you know some of your friends like the things you like, and a community level, because it gives you a snapshot of the zeitgeist of your circle of peeps. Downside - only works if you have a built-out friendlist on that platform.
• Blacklisting of genres/tags: I’m never going to buy an RTS game or an anime visual novel, or a game that’s been tagged with “Memes”, so showing me them is just spamming me with noise.
• Highly granular filters. No-one does this to the degree that I actually want. Let me filter by developer, publisher, year of release, ESRB rating, Metacritic score, genre, supported controllers, minimum/recommended spec, and so on and so on. If there’s an entry in your database for it, I want access to it as a filter term. E.g. “Show me all VR-compatible games released in 2017 from British developers, that will run on my machine, have a Metacritic > 70 and aren’t R-rated.”

Jonman wrote:

If there’s an entry in your database for it, I want access to it as a filter term. E.g. “Show me all VR-compatible games released in 2017 from British developers, that will run on my machine, have a Metacritic > 70 and aren’t R-rated.”

Thats an interesting idea, essentially a SQL search. Databases like JIRA have been making advanced database searches possible for a long time. (most better than JIRA!) that would be a nice feature. Steam does basically have this but as you say not quite to that degree.

I'm also interested in discussing 'features that help'

* Wishlist + wishlist notifications is a good one. Adding a 'watch for' price would be even better, especially if that data goes back to the developer, "Mean watch-for price on your game: $10" Oh, maybe I should do a $10 sale

polypusher wrote:

I'm also interested in discussing 'features that help'

* Wishlist + wishlist notifications is a good one. Adding a 'watch for' price would be even better, especially if that data goes back to the developer, "Mean watch-for price on your game: $10" Oh, maybe I should do a $10 sale

I realize that it's in no store's best interests to do this, but Enhanced Steam at least adds it to Steam's web interface - the "Historical Lowest Price across all storefronts" is a key bit of data in my discount purchasing decisions.

And to be honest, I've outsourced the "watch for price" function to isthereanydeal.com, as that performs that check against multiple storefronts.

True, and Im realizing its off topic anyway, as you've 'discovered' the thing by the time you wishlist it

Jonman wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

No.

I hate to give such a terse response, but that's the whole of it: no one is doing this well. Some are worse than others, but everything drowns under the sheer volume of content.

Clock's right, but there are some features that I find extremely useful for discovery:

• A feed showing friend’s purchases. This is great both on an individual level, because you know some of your friends like the things you like, and a community level, because it gives you a snapshot of the zeitgeist of your circle of peeps. Downside - only works if you have a built-out friendlist on that platform.
• Blacklisting of genres/tags: I’m never going to buy an RTS game or an anime visual novel, or a game that’s been tagged with “Memes”, so showing me them is just spamming me with noise.
• Highly granular filters. No-one does this to the degree that I actually want. Let me filter by developer, publisher, year of release, ESRB rating, Metacritic score, genre, supported controllers, minimum/recommended spec, and so on and so on. If there’s an entry in your database for it, I want access to it as a filter term. E.g. “Show me all VR-compatible games released in 2017 from British developers, that will run on my machine, have a Metacritic > 70 and aren’t R-rated.”

Theoretically Steam has all of this.

It's really too bad none of it actually works, especially because they crowdsourced it all out, so the tags are just pure noise.

Steam is missing some basic, basic stuff. I think they want the filters to be wide, but at the same time, they just miss stuff that should take no thought at all to code in. For example, I have every single iteration of Logistical. I have been buying them on the day they come out since the first one. And yet, every time I look at one, the recommendation box on the right tells me that “this game does not look like anything you’ve played before”. Seriously? With all the time I’ve put into these? This should be first thing checked. But it’s not.

Not impressed at all.

I'd never heard of Logistical so I looked, wow super niche! So this game basically doesn't fit Valve's algorithm for a 'good' game (that is, a game that launches and lots of people pick up immediately. That's it) so they even suppress it from it's biggest fans.

Not cool

I suspect video games are a particularly difficult media for this, given the high turnaround and short tails many of them have.

But I have to say, it's a delight seeing somebody with the opposite problem of me: I need to discover way less games that I want to play, given how tight time has become.

Robear wrote:

And yet, every time I look at one, the recommendation box on the right tells me that “this game does not look like anything you’ve played before”. Seriously? With all the time I’ve put into these? This should be first thing checked. But it’s not.

To be fair, Logistical isn't anything like anything you've played before except for Logistical, though.

I tried it and I really want to love it because it's so unique(a pure modern logistics game!) but I couldn't get past the UI.

cube wrote:

I tried it and I really want to love it because it's so unique(a pure modern logistics game!) but I couldn't get past the UI.

This. The UI is impenetrable, and I had no idea what the tutorial was trying to show me. I played through it twice and both times couldn't make any progress in the actual game.

I'm sure there's an interesting game there, I just can't be bothered to dig deep enough to find it.

The problem with the observations so far is that it's tagged "Casual, Indie, Strategy", and I have a large number of games with those tags. Even if it were just using tags, it should be able to identify those. Further, it *does* recommend some of the Logisticals in the Featured Games list; it's when I pick one and look at "Is it relevant to you?" that Steam is confused.

(Note that it's not a logistics game, like Factorio. It's a puzzle game with several different phases to it. I will say that the UI has been greatly improved, and is drag and drop from a supplier to an enduser; however, if you're expecting it to make order assignment automatic, the limit to that is repeating an order until it's filled. It has logic elements to it - in order to fill this location, you'll need to have done these other ones so that supply will build up - but it's not a company simulator. It's as much a discovery game (where in the world can I get sand?) as it is order fulfillment. But if you like it, it's pure heroin.)

Thinking about it more, of the smaller releases that I've discovered through storefronts, most of them have been through Sony's weekly-ish themed sales. They have plenty of franchise sales and publisher sales, but they'll also do sales with broader themes that allow them to highlight indie games, smaller releases, and overlooked titles.

On Nintendo's platforms and on Steam, where publishers and self-publishers can run whatever sales they want for however long they want, I eventually start tuning the sales and specials sections out. There are some games that are perpetually discounted so that they always appear in those sections, and it just becomes more chaff to sort through.

At the same time, Sony's solution is the opposite of what everyone wants to do: curation. They hand pick titles, negotiate with individual publishers and self-publishers, and then showcase those games. It seems like everyone else just wants to count on publishers to self-promote or for the magic of algorithms and crowd-sourcing to surface the good stuff.