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[Kyougar]

At the current Steam Sale, Valve is encouraging its Users to use the Discovery Queue with Card Drops (who have a monetary value). I think that’s a good thing and I found several Games already who I wishlisted.
(For anyone not knowing what the discovery Queue is: You click your DQ and will see a random (*cough* personalized) Shop Page with a game that Valve thinks you would find interesting. You have 3 Options: either to Wishlist it, to follow it or to click “not interested” so that it will not be displayed for you in the Discovery Queue again. And of course you are in the Shop Page of the game, so you could maybe even buy it.

The thing is:

The game has 5 to 8 Seconds to raise my Interest.

If I don’t see anything that piques my Interest, it will be Auto-"not interested" And if there are several seconds of Pegi Info, Dev/Publisher Logos, fucking Magazine Quotes or just a black screen for several seconds, I'm already on the next Page.
I'm not saying they should cut that out, but maybe start with some seconds of Gameplay and THEN show the usual disclaimer stuff.

There are 10.000 Games on Steam, someone who uses the discovery Queue most likely won’t check every game page for some minutes.
Sometimes the next 4 pictures pique my interest, but if these are also trailers or just CG or character art, I won’t bother.

But there are some who are doing a good job:
- Look at Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius (http://store.steampowered.com/app/313730/ free game) It's a tactical turn based mecha Visual Novel. The first Video starts with a combat screen and only the second has a normal Trailer. If the second trailer would be shown first, I would have only seen badly drawn Anime girls and would have clicked "not interested" after 2 Seconds.
- Or Shadowrun Dragonfall: (http://store.steampowered.com/app/300550/) after 2 Seconds you see the first gameplay and it switches between showing gameplay and the normal stuff that comes with a Trailer.
- Or Banished: (http://store.steampowered.com/app/242920/) who shows the Creation of your First settlement just 2 Seconds after the Logo.


And then we have the bad ones:
- Xcom enemy Unknown: (http://store.steampowered.com/app/200510/) A CG Video and the rest of the slots is 1 Video and rest CG screenshots (well, one is a worldview screenshot but as someone who wouldn’t know about Xcom, it would say nothing to him.)
- Wasteland 2: (http://store.steampowered.com/app/240760/) 14 Seconds until you see Gameplay. I'm 2 games further away at that time. And 3 additional Videoslots and a non-Gameplay Screenshot take the rest of the slots before you have to scroll. Not ideal for a gameplay heavy Game like Wasteland.

Mind you, I am arguing about the Discovery Queue and the act of discovering games here. In the time between the start of the discovery Queue and now I already had 2 Games I bought that I initially had flagged "not interested" Only after reading about it on GAF or other media had I checked the game out and thought it was cool, only to find out that I had initially flagged it as not Interested some months ago.

If you make Visual Novels / Adventure Games / or other Gametypes who don’t rely on Gameplay much, you can ignore the whole thing. But if your Game depends heavily on gameplay, you have to show it in the first seconds or it will be most likely flagged as "not interested" by someone who lazily grinds through his Discovery Queue.

Or maybe the whole Discovery Queue is not ideal, the way the Shop page is structured. Valve just slapped a "next" button to the normal Shop page and called it a day. But the Shop window was initially a point where a customer already had interest in the game in the first place, so you could show your fancy awards and CG Trailers without fearing that the customer would click "next" after 5 seconds.

I think Valve must rework the Discovery Queue to include a new page just for the Discovery Queue that the Dev can use. So that this page can be more tailored to the People who click through their discovery Queue.

Look at it this way: At the moment, the discovery Queue is just a Maxi CD or a digital playlist on shuffle. The shuffle time is 10 Seconds long and the song only starts after 15 Seconds or 2 minutes. Before that is either just static or nonsense.

 

[DoublePayje]

Funny how you argue atention span and when i opened your threat i, first, wanted to close the wall of text just aswell.

That aside: The queue is fine. No one should be forced by timers. You should make a conscious decision if you honestly want to discover and give the games a couple of moments to impress you. If you dont want that and click just through the queue, a timer will do nothing but annoy you.

 

[Htown]

No, there should not be a separate Discovery queue page apart from the game's store page.

The way I see it, when I land on a store page, I immediately see the game's title, the trailer with navigation to screenshots so I can see what the game looks like, the user review summary so I can see what people tend to think of the game, the game's description paragraph which gives the dev some space to tell me why their game is interesting, and several tags describing what kind of game it is.

If none of those things grab me as a user, then either the game just isn't for me, or you have completely failed to get across why your game is interesting, in which case I would never have looked at it in the first place.

 

[Kyougar]

What? Where do I talk about including timers?
The times are in relation to the first gameplay showing.

The discovery Queue is a good thing, IF it would be better to really discover stuff instead of "Oh yeah I wanted to wishlist that game ages ago"
So I argue about changing the first thing your customer sees before he clicks "not interested" (i.e. showing gameplay first if you are an indie Developer with a niche game that focuses on gameplay) or for Valve to completely change the Page where the discovery Queue is located.

No, there should not be a separate Discovery queue page apart from the game's store page.

The way I see it, when I land on a store page, I immediately see the game's title, the trailer with navigation to screenshots so I can see what the game looks like, the user review summary so I can see what people tend to think of the game, the game's description paragraph which gives the dev some space to tell me why their game is interesting, and several tags describing what kind of game it is.

But all of these Infos could be displayed in a seperate Discovery page that the Dev can change and customize in such a way that a Customer who only browses the Discovery Queue at that time would linger more than 5 Seconds.

 

[Sinople]

I use this time to read the info on the game (tags, impressions) or I just skip to the interesting part of the trailer. Not a problem for me.

 

[Htown]

But all of these Infos could be displayed in a seperate Discovery page that the Dev can change and customize in such a way that a Customer who only browses the Discovery Queue at that time would linger more than 5 Seconds.

But what information about the game would you put on a separate page that isn't already shown to me in that 5 seconds?

The point of this thing is not for devs to "trap" a customer to make them like their game, it's for users to power through a dozen games on Steam at a time to see things they might be interested in.

 

[DoublePayje]

Ah sorry, should have specified: No you don't say anything about timers, but it could be an obvious choice to tackle the problem. Like you can only click next after ten seconds. Would help nothing.

And most other options wouldn't help either. If you don't care to give a game a chance after the first impression, well what can you do. It all comes down to the attitude of the consumer.

 

[Kyougar]

But these first impression can be a lost sale for the developer because he decided to show Pegi/ESRB Info and a black screen instead of things that can hook a possible buyer. This is not the fault of the Store page, that is the fault of the discovery queue just being an overlay over the store page.

With 10.000 Games on Steam you need 14 hours to go through it if you give every page 5 seconds before clicking not interested. 10 seconds are 28 hours. (not included is the wait for the pageload when Steam servers are clunky)

One step Valve could do is to include positive and negative Filters in the discovery Queue.
So if I want to discover Tactical SciFi games I can do that with those two filters included. currently I can only click on 1 Label, i.e. Scifi and will get a list of Games that are labeled SciFi but not in the discivery queue.
And if I want to exclude Survival or Zombie I should be able to exclude those lables and dont get Games in my DQ with those lables. But maybe devs would pressure Valve to get rid of certain labels on their games.

 

[beeswax]

... if there are several seconds of Pegi Info, Dev/Publisher Logos, fucking Magazine Quotes or just a black screen for several seconds, I'm already on the next Page.

While I don't give 2 shits whether they fix this or not, I'm with you on this OP. I'm exactly the same when flicking through my Discovery Queue - if the first 5-10s of the trailer is just guff, I'm onto the next item in the queue.

The only thing this hurts is their sales, if they were more effective at grabbing attention with the trailers, my wallet might be hurting even more that it does currently.

 

[Saty]

The thing is:

The game has 5 to 8 Seconds to raise my Interest.

If I don’t see anything that piques my Interest, it will be Auto-"not interested"

You should just skip to the next game w\o choosing anything. If you only browse the page for few seconds then it's wise not to rule anything out and to just mark the stuff that did grab you.

Anyhow, the Queue has way more basic issues like it ignoring completely games you might have played and finished using Family Sharing.

 

[samn]

I don't look at game trailers. they rarely tell me what I want to know about the game.

 

[Zepp Twofist]

You should just skip to the next game w\o choosing anything. If you only browse the page for few seconds then it's wise not to rule anything out and to just mark the stuff that did grab you.

Basically this. Don't mark stuff you don't actively dislike as "not interesting". Just skip it and look at it later.

 

[toddhunter]

That is the issue? No.

Here is a tip. If I say "not interested" to 9 FPS games in a queue, don't show me 8 more FPS games in the next queue because they are "on sale" or "popular".

The whole implementation is just stuffed.

 

[wrowa]

I don't look at game trailers. they rarely tell me what I want to know about the game.

Yeah, I'm usually just looking at screenshots and some general information about the game. That's enough to know whether I'm interested at all or not. I'll only watch a trailer if a game has already captured my interest.

 

[tmarg]

That is the issue? No.

Here is a tip. If I say "not interested" to 9 FPS games in a queue, don't show me 8 more FPS games in the next queue because they are "on sale" or "popular".

The whole implementation is just stuffed.

The weird thing is it actually used to be better, it would say stuff like "based on your recent play time in x" and x would actually be vaguely similar to the game being offered.

 

[CecilRousso]

Most of the times, I don't check the trailer in the queue. I immediately check the screenshots, genre and then the review summary. It works quite well for me, and after having checked about 500 games and had the opportunity to click not interested in all survival/crafting games, the queue supringsly often shows interesting games now.

 

[toddhunter]

The weird thing is it actually used to be better, it would say stuff like "based on your recent play time in x" and x would actually be vaguely similar to the game being offered.

Yeah something has gone wrong.

The only explanation I can think of is that the introduction of the user tagging system screwed it all up. That, or I accidentally purchased a Ubisoft game and now steam quite rightly assumes I'll buy any old shit.

 

[Talyn]

The weird thing is it actually used to be better, it would say stuff like "based on your recent play time in x" and x would actually be vaguely similar to the game being offered.

If this is correct then Valve really needs to fix this because as it is now the discovery queue is utterly useless. I've only been using it during the sale for cards but nearly every game it shows me is shown because it's popular. I don't need a queue to know what's popular, I can see the top sellers on the main store page! Steam knows what I've bought, what I've played and what's on my wishlist, it should be able to do something with all that data and recommend games I might actually be interested in playing.

 

[yurinka]

The discovery queue is not personalized at all. It just shows me the best selling / featured games. They type of games they show me almost never are related to my tastes or what I bought or played in Steam.

I only have small indies in Steam because I play the AAA games on console and they constantly show me there AAA, frequently from genres and themes I don't like, totally unrelated to my game list or whishlist.

And well, even sometimes they highlight stuff I like here or in other places of Steam but I already purchased it. How about if they filter it? I won't buy it and they can use this space and time spent in shop with games I don't own, so more likely to be purchased.

If Steam wants to know the tastes of a player, just check the genre, themes, tags, price range of the games I own and play (giving extra priority to these ones) and have in the wishlist, to create a profile of my tastes and cross it with the games that have players with the same tastes own but I don't.

And to sort these games, assign them a rank depending on sales, user rating, amount of curators I follow that recommend it, metacritic, average amount of hours played on Steam, how similar are its tags to my tastes, if I have it on the wishlist or not and amounts of friends of mine who own it. This rank would be used to sort them in my discovery queue, to sort or customize the game highlighted in the front page of the shop specially during sales,etc.

In addition to that, would be nice if they allow me to log in with my PSN, XBL, GameCenter, Google Play accounts to see which games I already own in other platforms so they don't need to show me here and to improve that player profile.

 

[Zaptruder]

Just used my discovery queue again.

It works fine for me.

There are some games that it recommends that I don't give a shit about period. Click on not interested and move on.

Some games look potentially interesting... look at the reviews, look at the screen shots, add to wishlist.

And some games I've seen before that... don't really think they're terrible, just not in the mood at this current time.

And then I browse my wishlist for sales and see what I feel like spending.

Often I end up refunding games before 2 hours is up... because hey, the discovery queue got me to try it... and I realized it's not my cup of tea.

 

[Brerlappin]

My problem with the Queue is that it seems to think I exclusively want to play sandbox, survival mmo crafting titles. Of the 200+ titles ive seen in my queue, the majority have been survival crafting trash and maybe 5-10 titles I was legit interested in. The queue has no idea the types of games in actually interested in

 

[LiK]

I rarely watch the trailers on Steam. I check user reviews instead.

 

[Kyougar]

I rarely watch the trailers on Steam. I check user reviews instead.

Using the Discovery queue has nothing to do with "watching trailers". The trailer is the first thing that pops up while using the DQ. If you check up on user reviews, you are already partially interested in that game.

We want to DISCOVER games. But like I said, if you even give the title just 5 seconds to hook you up for a closer look, you will need 14 hours to complete the Discovery Queue with 10000 games on Steam.

Reviews:
Just looking at the numeral value or the text displayed has no value for an individual. Look at Hyperdimensional Neptunia (which I own) for example. It has critical acclaim and 96% positive reviews. If I wouldnt like Anime games this numeral value and the whole review would be pointless for someone who dont like anime Games.
Well, there are anime Girls on the frontpage so maybe not so great Example, look at normal Strategy or RPG Niche games: Mount and Blade Warband has also critical Acclaim and 96% Review score. It is one of my most played and most regarded games. I would have overlooked it in the discovery Queue even with 96% Review Score. Because User Review Score is kinda useless. Only Owners of the game can review it (which is fine) and for niche Games, that is most likely a hardcore following that knows what it gets into. But it is useless for someone who just browses his discovery queue.

 

[Loona]

I don't use the discovery queue because there no way to check what ends up in the Not Interested list if you misclick.

 

[JawesomeJaw]

Dota playtime ruined any chance of them tailoring suggestions in anyway for me.

 

[Caesar III]

The queue could be so much better with two major features imho:

"I played this already" Button
a lot of games I played or own on PSN, GOG, uplay, Origin or elsewhere. I cannot use "not interested" for those cause that's not true. If and when they implement the better recommendation algorithm I'm fucked otherwise

Tag Filter
I want to filter "Sandbox" + "MMO" + "Survival" please. Do not show me this crap.

 

[paperspace]

The queue could be so much better with two major features imho:

"I played this already" Button
a lot of games I played or own on PSN, GOG, uplay, Origin or elsewhere. I cannot use "not interested" for those cause that's not true. If and when they implement the better recommendation algorithm I'm fucked otherwise

Tag Filter
I want to filter "Sandbox" + "MMO" + "Survival" please. Do not show me this crap.

Wait, are you serious?

 

[Coreda]

The queue needs an extra button to the effect of:

I already know about this game (or I do now), and think it's good but it's not something I want to buy atm. I'd like Steam to know this so its algorithm can show me more but clicking 'Not Interested' will skew the filter. On the other hand I don't want to add it to my wishlist or news feed by clicking the 'Follow' button.​

Basically a Like / Show Me More Like This button.

 

[chrominance]

Honestly, I just read the descriptions to see if I might like it or not. I don't even bother with the autoplay video until after the description has gotten my attention, and if the description says "zombie survival crafting mmo" no amount of flashy video is likely to bring me back.

 

[Htown]

"I played this already" Button
a lot of games I played or own on PSN, GOG, uplay, Origin or elsewhere. I cannot use "not interested" for those cause that's not true. If and when they implement the better recommendation algorithm I'm fucked otherwise

But it is true that you're not interested, unless you want Steam to try to sell you games you already have.

They don't use Not Interested to figure out what kinds of games to not put in your queue.

They do, however, use play time and store page views to positively add stuff to your recommendations on the main store page. I don't think you can see that right now because of the sale, but usually if you scroll down you get stuff like that. "You recently played Valkyria Chronicles, so here are some games like that." "You recently looked at Just Cause 3 on the store, so here are similar games." "Here's some stuff similar to this game on your wishlist."

 

[WanderingWind]

It has become pretty much impossible to just browse on Steam any more. I find the queues to be unweildy as hell and the new release slider is mixed in with crap Steam thinks I want, old as balls titles and Early Access and Greenlight garbage. Even the "new release" tab in the tabbed box below is usually just DLC releases for old games mixed with a couple of actual new games.

The "personalized" queue is complete shit. Apparently, even though I own hundreds of games, the one MMO (Marvel Heroes) that I've played for about 4 hours means that I just love the shit out of MMOs.

Add to that the stuff the OP talked about and the ridiculously slow client and I've stopped going to Steam until I actual know what I want. It's in severe need of a complete redesign, too. It still looks like a 2008-era web site and it's a complete jumbled mess.