The All New Gabriel Newell's Digital Wonder Emporium, aka, The Steam Update Thread

Steam - 2018 Year in Review

Pretty in depth.

At the end they talk about 2019:

Here's a sneak peek at a few of the more notable things we plan to ship this year:

Store Discoverability: We’re working on a new recommendation engine powered by machine-learning, that can match players to games based on their individual tastes. Algorithms are only a part of our discoverability solution, however, so we're building more broadcasting and curating features and are constantly assessing the overall design of the store.

Steam China: We've partnered with Perfect World to bring Steam onshore into China. We'll reveal more details about this in the coming months.

Steam Library Update: Some long awaited changes to the Steam Client will ship, including a reworked Steam Library, built on top of the technology we shipped in Steam Chat.

New Events System: We're upgrading the events system in the Steam Community, enabling you to highlight interesting activities in your games like tournaments, streams, or weekly challenges.

Steam TV: We're working on expanding Steam TV beyond just broadcasting specific tournaments and special events, in order to support all games.

Steam Chat: We're going to ship a new Steam Chat mobile app, so you can share your favorite GIFs with your friends while on the go.

Steam Trust: The technology behind Trusted Matchmaking on CS:GO is getting an upgrade and will become a full Steam feature that will be available to all games. This means you'll have more information that you can use to help determine how likely a player is a cheater or not.

Steam PC Cafe Program: We are going to officially ship a new PC Cafe Program so that players can have a good experience using Steam in hundreds of thousands of PC Cafes Worldwide.

They now price games in AUD in Australia but because some games haven't done the currency conversion or something they're not available. Which is horses***. I guess maybe there is some benefit I'm unaware of, but there was already regional pricing meaning triple A games could be $110 for no good reason.

And I think maybe they're still in court over the Australian Consumer Law business. I guess if they couldn't get out of the "you do business in Australia" thing then, they definitely can't now.

Logged in for the first time in a long time, and they've made some improvements but a lot of the Steam UX just sucks. The store loads really poorly on my connection which is admittedly not great but is more than enough to play the games in the store. Also, only took one day to accidentally hit the big picture mode button.

So steam has finally released their new Recommendation engine. It apparently looks at your top 50 games (by play time) and compares them to other people who have those games in their top 50 and makes recommendations from that.

Steam Recommender

I tried it and found it worked a bit better if I moved the slider a bit over from "Popular" towards "Niche". Setting it to either extreme either made it extremely predictable or extremely weird. Here's what it looks like for me.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/rgdqZZP.png)

Fun. 5 of the top 15 it recommends are games I own on Switch. So it's not too far off.

Nice although it makes me question how their recommendations worked before if it wasn’t doing something as simple as this.

Tags. Apparently that was all it looked at before.

Well the first ten games it recommended were ones I have no interest in, followed by two I'm interested in among the next ten.

I didn't have much hope as soon as I saw my first recommendation was a clicker game.

It was not a bad selection of recommendations. I owned some of the games on GOG or other platforms.

What made me laugh was the list of top played games. If I just had that list and was asked to pick a game for someone based off the idea that they played at least 20 hours of each I would have no idea what to get them.

Spoiler:

Idle Champions
Path of Exile
Warframe
Rocket League
X3TC
Marvel Puzzle Quest
TF2
Payday 2
Witcher 3
Skyrim
Blood Bowl
Monster Hunter World
Dark Souls 3
Binding of Isaac
Orcs must Die 2
Terrerria
Civ 5
Saints Row 3
Dishonored
Rainbow 6 Siege
Metal Gear 5
Far Cry 5
Stardew Valley
Darkest Dungeon
Sins of a Solar Empire
Witcher 1
Xenonauts
FTL
Binding of Isaac (the newer one)
Starbound
Disgea 5
Risen
Mount and Blade Warband
Fallout 4
Dont Starve
Modeheim
Door kickers
Space Hulk
Invisible Inc
E.Y.E.
Counter Strike GO
Fallout New Vegas
Mark of the Ninja
Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines
Rainbow Six 3
Space Marine
Deus Ex HR
Orcs Must Die Unchained
They Bleed pixels

I am not sure why some games were picked while others where skipped. I have a decent amount of time in Thief 2/Tyranny/Nier on steam but it must be a little less than the others or I have not played them recently?

Heh. I own pretty much everything it recommended, but not on Steam.

I know the purpose is to drive sales, but, it would be nice if it could recommend games that I already own that I might want to actually play.

PWAlessi wrote:

I know the purpose is to drive sales, but, it would be nice if it could recommend games that I already own that I might want to actually play.

I'm kind of getting that effect -- it's reminding me of a bunch of games that I bought elsewhere.

Oh you! I'm not falling for that!!!

Gah! It's all different!

Quite a change to the look of the library if you're opted in to the beta.

Yeah, it is. It's weeeeeeeeeeeeeeird.

ok...i like this better than what they had before. Definitely an improvement.

Steam is adding a feature to allow single screen local multiplayer games be played on multiple screens.

https://www.engadget.com/2019/10/10/...

and in a tweet reply to PC Gamer:

Alden Kroll wrote:

To clarify: it really is only for shared-screen or split-screen games. The tech is streaming your screen to your friend and capturing their input and sending it back to the game, so you are both playing the same game, looking at the same thing.

That would be awesome for Rocket League. My friend and I recently played and instead of split screen I got on my PC and he logged in on my PS4.

Is PAX Aus stuff on the front page of Steam store for anyone outside Australia?

Mermaidpirate wrote:

Is PAX Aus stuff on the front page of Steam store for anyone outside Australia?

It is on mine.

P.S. not in Australia

\o/ Woo! Might check some of it out tomorrow.

Dang the new library is ugly.

Stealthpizza wrote:

Dang the new library is ugly.

I haven't noticed any difference, but that might be because I'm using a skin.

Edit: Nevermind, patch applied.

I hate it too.
I hate with the fiery passion of a million dying suns.

Eleima wrote:
Stealthpizza wrote:

Dang the new library is ugly.

I haven't noticed any difference, but that might be because I'm using a skin.

Edit: Nevermind, patch applied.

I hate it too.
I hate with the fiery passion of a million dying suns.

I dig it.

An attractive, dynamically sized display icon for each of my games. Dynamic and manual filters that work well. A low-bandwidth mode that's a god-send on this little island and eliminates most of the social media/community content stuff that I don't want. No more mostly-empty screens with links to RPS posts that are two years old. And when I click on a game, I get a lovely screen that summarized everything and gives me links to anything I might want to dig deeper on.

There's an inevitable amount of kicking and screaming that comes with changing anything in the gaming community, but I'm really not sure what's to like in this new update compared to the old one.

I'm mostly with Coldstream - it's an improvement, but I'm mostly on the side of not caring. I wasn't hanging out in my library - it was just a means to find and launch games, and that's still functional. If anything, it now does a better job of surfacing relevant information about my games, most notably recent updates/patches.

The dynamic filters are really amazing, especially with the incredibly-useful Store Tags. For example, just set one for the tag "4 player local" and boom, all the games you can play with your kids -- and it will automatically add new games as you buy new ones. Neat stuff.

Archangel wrote:

The dynamic filters are really amazing, especially with the incredibly-useful Store Tags. For example, just set one for the tag "4 player local" and boom, all the games you can play with your kids -- and it will automatically add new games as you buy new ones. Neat stuff.

I agree. I think the dynamic filters--and the ability to create a "shelf" to store them--has the potential to be really powerful. Finding and arranging stuff in a large Steam library has always been an issue, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Ugh, the look of this update is horrible.

- Forced "What's New" on my library tab for things I don't care about and can't turn off.
- Useless mouse-over pop ups
- More than half of my games do not have portrait art. Only tiny landscape art and the rest is blurred.
- I can't adjust the artwork thumbnail size anymore either?
- Tiny ass fonts and icons and the game detail screen is a mess.

Ah well, it seems the best launcher is still Windows. (I'm old school.) Especially with all the other stores I have nowadays.

Well maybe gog 2.0 will have a good option to launch games from other launchers so all my games can be in one place.

PaladinTom wrote:

Ugh, the look of this update is horrible.

- Forced "What's New" on my library tab for things I don't care about and can't turn off.
- Useless mouse-over pop ups
- More than half of my games do not have portrait art. Only tiny landscape art and the rest is blurred.
- I can't adjust the artwork thumbnail size anymore either?
- Tiny ass fonts and icons and the game detail screen is a mess.

Ah well, it seems the best launcher is still Windows. (I'm old school.) Especially with all the other stores I have nowadays.

Favorite launcher for me is Playnite. Even works with Game Pass games, except that's the one service it doesn't auto-update the library on, but at least it can find them and let you click to add them.

But yeah, also hoping gog 2.0 will deliver on its promise, but until then, I'm pretty happy, and it tracks gameplay time, which is something I like keeping tabs on.