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Steam store page update (discovery, curation, customization, blueness)

Nzyme32

Member
Now all they have to do is remake the Library, Community and the Profile section and steam will be perfect.

Was about to say, the inventory and badge layouts are really crappy. I'm sure they'll have to focus on all of those sooner or later if they are not currently doing so behind closed doors
 

Jb

Member
I like the idea of Steam recommanding games based on what you play/like, Netflix style. Not that useful for me since I know which games I do and do not want, but for more casual users it looks like a step in the right direction, and in the long term will hopefully help devs get the exposure they deserve.
 

draetenth

Member
Is there a way to customize it so it doesn't show certain genres/tags? I don't play multiplayer or f2p games so I would like to tell Steam not to show any of those... The closest I found was getting Dota 2 in my queue and saying not interested, but I want to do that for every game that is multiplayer only or f2p...
 

Zabi

Banned
I'll get back to you guys once I've finished going through all 3500+ games that I have not yet either bought or put on my wishlist. So far I've gone through about 900 games and I've ended up buying a couple games I didn't know about that are on sale and I've added a bunch of games I didn't know about to my wishlist.

In case you didn't read the full announcement, when you tell it that you are not interested in a game, it will not be featured. That means that if I ignore that popular game I don't care about I will not longer see it featured over and over again. I'm seeing dramatic improvements on my featured page.

Edit: I'll try to go through at least 500 games a day.
 
Impressive results. It seems that for these first days visibility is markedly improved. In my case the queue in particular has made me add over 20 new games to my wishlist from 40 or so games I've checked out in total. Overall I'm quite impressed so far.
 

Spearin

Neo Member
@crimsonhead: Thanks for the link to my blog post.

Just a quick update on the store page visits for Insurgency:

Sunday (pre-update): 5,852
Monday: 21,591
Tuesday: 83,284

So yeah... continues to rise rapidly. And I would consider us 'the little guy.'

Also, we surpassed 10,000 members in the official group (up from just under 6,000 pre-update). If you take a look at The Long Dark, they've accumulated over 40,000 members in a few days, having the benefit of prominent placement at the launch and being an Early Access title that people want to keep an eye on.

Despite all the neigh-saying speculation, the results speak for themselves.
 
@crimsonhead: Thanks for the link to my blog post.

Just a quick update on the store page visits for Insurgency:

Sunday (pre-update): 5,852
Monday: 21,591
Tuesday: 83,284

So yeah... continues to rise rapidly. And I would consider us 'the little guy.'

Also, we surpassed 10,000 members in the official group (up from just under 6,000 pre-update). If you take a look at The Long Dark, they've accumulated over 40,000 members in a few days, having the benefit of prominent placement at the launch and being an Early Access title that people want to keep an eye on.

Despite all the neigh-saying speculation, the results speak for themselves.

Hey Spearin I made a thread about your post. You can chime in if you want. Also going to quote this over there if you don't mind.
 
I hate the curators crap. Shit needs to be optional but thay show up on every game page above "about this game". Madness.
I think once it (hopefully) skews more towards 'hardcore rpgs only' and less 'hot youtuber' it will be a lot more helpful as it will contain a lot of specifics you'll want to know that won't be in the page info.
 

Saty

Member
They need to go back to the drawing board for all the Curators initiative.

A general list of all kind of games with one line thoughts that link to external sources shouldn't be part of a Curators program. It isn't more useful than picking a tag, going to 'see all games' and then sort the list by user ratings. Bam, instant curation of all the best games according to players.
Want to have a portal of your user\website\publication on Steam that has list of games you like with external links? Great, put that under extended Steam Reviews & Recommendations.

- The baseline requirement to open a Curator page should be that you written X Steam Reviews that have been marked as Y% helpful or at least not marked for being unhelpful crap. And you have to maintain a reasonable ratio.
-Every game you would like to promote must have a Steam Review written by you. Any external links would be on top of that.
- Curators shouldn't be about only dumping a list of game. There needs to be a sort of discussion forum for each Curator page where the person explains his tastes and explains what he thinks makes for a good game in the genres he's covering.
- Ideally, Curators are individuals who specialize in subsets of genres and kinds of games rather than post about every single new game. I want to have go-to guys for certain kind of games rather than somebody trying to be a jack-of-all-trades.
- Curation shouldn't stop at recommending games to go buy because they are great. Not every game you cover as a Curator should fall in that group and appear in the game's store page. This is why you need a forum discussion where the person can point to a game in the genre that does something interesting but isn't necessarily a great game you should go buy ASAP. Point out curiosities; Explain why he doesn't appreciate some game; Note that people who love their [Genre] with this or that mechanic or leaning to this or that direction might want to give it a try even if he himself didn't care much for it.

- You need to be able to click on a tag and check a box that basically says 'Notify me on new releases that were tagged as such and that been recommended by Curator X'. And you choose whoever you want.

And of course you should be able to hide the Curators comments popping in game pages, especially if it's from people you aren't following or don't want to hear from.
 

Zabi

Banned
I said I'd get back to you guys once I had finished blasting through the entire queue. Well, it seems Steam doesn't let you do that. I had one left in the current dozen, I clicked next, and I was back at the home screen. I clicked to go to the queue and I was booted back to home screen again and now it showed my queue was empty. I tried going to queue again but it loaded home screen.

As of around noon EST on September 29th I have been allowed to go through maybe around 3300 games. I can't get a exact amount since I cannot go to the queue screen but I remember it being around that. My number of purchased games is 116 (48 are hidden) and 86 are in my wishlist. As you can see, there is still a ways to go until I'm done going through Steam's selection of games.
 

Fireblend

Banned
As a user I'm really happy with the update. I like the Netflix-like specific categories; way way better than the few rigid ones it had before.
 

Sendou

Member
Somehow completely missed Facepunch hiring guys behind Before. That's so cool! The game looks spectacular too:

Screenshot_20.jpg


Screenshot_19.jpg


Screenshot_15.jpg

I'm in love with that art style.
 

Zabi

Banned
Turns out I ran into a bug when I said Steam wasn't letting me queue any more. The way I got around it was by finding a game I hadn't yet done anything with, click however I wanted to handle the game, and then click to view queue. I continued doing this until I gave up on the queue and instead decided to do things the slow way by clicking on a recommended game from the home page, clicking however I wanted to handle the game, and repeat. The way I know when I was done would be when either it stopped recommending me games I hadn't already decided something on.

And so now I'm done. This little stitch should hopefully give you an idea of how different the store looks after you've swept through the place.

ntqyac6.png


As you can see, the more recommendations section has gotten much, much smaller and what is there is stuff from my wishlist.
 
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