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Valve - "Planned Changes to Steam Store"

Nzyme32

Member
SteamWorks developers are being notified of upcoming Steam Store changes that should be rolling out over the next few weeks:

We wanted to let you know about some upcoming improvements we're working on for the Steam Store and what it might mean for your game.

When we launched the Steam Discovery Update, we introduced a new and smarter Steam store built around personalization and recommendations. In the time since the Discovery Update, we've iterated on the features and made improvements to support the goal of helping each customer find the titles they are most likely to enjoy playing. We think our progress in this direction has been really valuable in supporting a broader variety of gaming experiences big and small, while better serving individual customer tastes.

We've got another set of changes in the works to continue along this path. All this is subject to change to some degree in response to your feedback and suggestions, but here are the general highlights of this upcoming update:

Home Page Visual Refresh.
The Steam home page will be getting a visual refresh to use bigger game images in some places, add some new ways of surfacing games, and remove some visual clutter.

d716def96f75bf4fb8ad6ff82e8f37d4ffa23772.jpg


Additional Left Column Navigation.
The left column of navigation on the home page will be getting a new section of links to main destinations such as new releases, top sellers, recently updated, upcoming releases, and specials. When logged in, there will also be links to sections for you such as popular among friends, recommendations by curators you follow, and your discovery queue.

6febb77e95c98cbb173ed3a38c80b993c9e77b86.jpg


Friends Activity.
We're adding a prominent new 'Popular Among Friends' section right to the home page that will highlight what your friends have been buying and playing.

Top Selling New Releases.
We're adding a new section to the home page for new releases that have reached the top sellers list.

Global Customer Preferences.
We're adding some new options for users to specify their preferences for which product types they wish to see across the entire home page, rather than managing each section individually. This will let customers opt to exclude particular types of products, such as Early Access, Software, Videos, and VR from appearing on their Steam home page and on a couple other browse pages.

Targeted Visibility For New Releases.
We'll be making some changes to the initial launch visibility of new titles to better reach appropriate customers. While we previously granted 1M impressions of each new titles on the home page, this approach was not scaling well and was an inefficient method for reaching the right potential customers. Click-through rates for most titles featured in this section were low, and it had become clear that not every new release is relevant to every user. We think we can do better.

With the upcoming changes, newly released titles will appear in a few different ways on the "New on Steam" page and in the "New on Steam" Queue. The goal is to reach a more engaged group of customers, and drive more relevant traffic directly to your store page. This change should result in your title appearing to a smaller, but better targeted group of potential customers based on their preferences and tastes. New releases will continue to be recommended to specific users on the Steam Home page and can appear in popular lists if doing well.

Targeted Visibility For Game Updates.
Update Visibility Rounds will be changed to show your game to a better targeted group of customers. While Update Rounds previously caused a game to appear for 500,000 impressions on the home page, we found this method to be too broad for effectively reaching interested customers. We'll be changing this system to instead show the game to a more targeted group of customers. This will include your existing customers, users with the game on their wishlist, and other customers that Steam recommends the game to. This visibility will continue to be on the Steam home page and may show your title for up to a week in this spot.

More Steam Curator Options.
We've noticed that more than a few Steam Curators are using the curator feature to provide valuable information about games, while not necessarily recommending the title. We're going to give Steam Curators the tools to indicate whether their post is recommended, not recommended, or simply informational. This helps us better understand whether a curation should be used to promote a game on the front page of Steam, or if it's intended to be informational that should primarily appear on the individual product page.

Curators in Main Capsule.
The Main Capsule banner will be updated to include titles recommended by Steam Curators that users follow. This means we can better surface appropriate titles to individual users based on who they follow and trust to make recommendations.

Improved Steam Curator Presence.
When following one or more Steam Curators, users will see a specific section on the home page that highlights recent recommendations. This space can include popular new releases or smaller niche titles depending on which curators the user is following. This section is being improved to show off the games in a better way. Additionally, we're creating a new landing page to highlight many of the titles recommended by all the Curators the user follows.

We're actively working on this set of features, and planning to roll out the update in a few weeks. We're looking for your feedback on these changes and your suggestions for how we can best connect your game with the customers most likely to enjoy it.
 

Nzyme32

Member
My site published news of this and confirmed with several developers, it's legit.

https://techraptor.net/content/valve-announces-updates-to-steam-store

Ah cool I removed the line about being unsure. Thanks

CTRL+F "Customer Service"

Product not found

"Customer service" ie support, isn't a part of the actual store page / home page thing, which is what this seems to be about. This has been sorely in need of an update since the discovery update. Obviously support update is a necessity but who the hell knows on that front
 

Caffeine

Gold Member
glad they keep updating the store visuals I actually hated the discovery update, but when is the actual client getting a visual update its pretty much been the same for 8 years now other than a few extra buttons and a gradient blue to gray color lol.

I don't think any of the skins released by people are good lol.
 

Eolz

Member
Sounds like good changes, as long as it's well implemented obviously.
Current one is indeed a bit too cluttered for the same thing.
 

Nzyme32

Member
I'll take it in classic gray, please and thanks, gabe.

Let's take it even further with that old school green.

You're not thinking grand enough - custom colour and style options and better skin support, maybe even with a built in workshop for it.
Very unlikely
. I quite like the blue but I do miss the green days of old

Maybe I'll get less of those dull visual novels that I've never bought a single one of and never will.

This is my main issue. It seems to always be based on "your friends play x". Blocking just those would be great

Hope they plan some changes to the desktop app too. Feels ancient compared to most other services.

Snappier refreshed client app would be fantastic. I was hoping since Steam Dev Days is round the corner (Oct 12-13) they might announce some stuff. This is a nice start, but hoping for more
 

Nzyme32

Member
Still no option to hide Early Access titles?

Global Customer Preferences.
We're adding some new options for users to specify their preferences for which product types they wish to see across the entire home page, rather than managing each section individually. This will let customers opt to exclude particular types of products, such as Early Access, Software, Videos, and VR from appearing on their Steam home page and on a couple other browse pages.

Are there Steam Curators that make lists on not recommended games?

Several like the 30fps games highlighter, but you don't want those to be recommended to you. In that sense the update is better, but it is yet to be seen if the implementation will work well enough. The curator thing has been abandoned since the discovery update (over a year back?) until whenever this update comes, so my faith in that system being maintained is still not there
 

kafiend

Member
Steam, for as long as its allowed "any old crap" on its store has been crap. For sure its reduced the amount of stuff that I buy. These days I barely, if at all, pay attention to Steam as a release platform. Improve the overall quality of the releases and I'd probably take it more seriously.
 

Digby

Neo Member
I keep thinking they are going to add adjustable font sizes. I can barely read some text on a 1440p monitor. Or maybe I'm just an idiot waiting for a feature that already exists.
 

Nzyme32

Member
Steam, for as long as its allowed "any old crap" on its store has been crap. For sure its reduced the amount of stuff that I buy. These days I barely, if at all, pay attention to Steam as a release platform at all. Improve the overall quality of the releases and I'd probably take it more seriously.

Opposite for me and seemingly most of the SteamGAF folks. I'm buying more than ever and from a much wider range of genres / developers than before. Problem with the store is that sifting through it is difficult and the layout of things is fairly cluttered. I find I rely on GAF to highlight several of the games that I would miss otherwise.

Of course there are much more shit-tier / shovelware games and alike, but thankfully the store isn't showing the vast majority. Instead my current problem is messy recommendations. It's something like a 65 / 35 split of excellent and god awful choices, with the worst of it being VNs because friend x is playing / bought it, or it is trending games that I don't care about (F2P survival stuff that rarely is what I want)

The global preferences and other changes look set to go some way to solving these
 

jediyoshi

Member
Steam, for as long as its allowed "any old crap" on its store has been crap. For sure its reduced the amount of stuff that I buy. These days I barely, if at all, pay attention to Steam as a release platform. Improve the overall quality of the releases and I'd probably take it more seriously.

The direction they're going to stick with is increasing curation and targeted releases. You don't want to go back to a time when even someone like Iron Galaxy had to start entire website campaigns to get their games approved.

Realistically this is already a non-issue for other distributors. It's like not shitty things on Amazon or Netflix or eBay hampers your ability to take in the good stuff, it's all in how discovery is set up.
 

epmode

Member
Steam, for as long as its allowed "any old crap" on its store has been crap. For sure its reduced the amount of stuff that I buy. These days I barely, if at all, pay attention to Steam as a release platform. Improve the overall quality of the releases and I'd probably take it more seriously.

Man, people have a warped view of Old Steam. While the average quality of each release was obviously higher, it was really awful when excellent games were denied a release for weeks/months/years just because they didn't get enough press or some random Valve employee didn't notice it.

Continue to release EVERYTHING, but improve visibility of quality games on the storefront and provide more tools for each user to tailor the games that appear. So yeah, it sounds like they have some good ideas.
 

Caffeine

Gold Member
actually you know what the invisible window only occurs if steam is snapped

reporting this to the metro teams discussion board.
 

SapientWolf

Trucker Sexologist
Steam, for as long as its allowed "any old crap" on its store has been crap. For sure its reduced the amount of stuff that I buy. These days I barely, if at all, pay attention to Steam as a release platform. Improve the overall quality of the releases and I'd probably take it more seriously.
Steam is not a curator. There are other people more qualified to perform that task.
 

Lanrutcon

Member
Global Customer Preferences.
We're adding some new options for users to specify their preferences for which product types they wish to see across the entire home page, rather than managing each section individually. This will let customers opt to exclude particular types of products, such as Early Access, Software, Videos, and VR from appearing on their Steam home page and on a couple other browse pages.



Several like the 30fps games highlighter, but you don't want those to be recommended to you. In that sense the update is better, but it is yet to be seen if the implementation will work well enough. The curator thing has been abandoned since the discovery update (over a year back?) until whenever this update comes, so my faith in that system being maintained is still not there

Omw. Amazing!
 

jshackles

Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the capability to make the world's first enhanced store. Steam will be that store. Better than it was before.
These all sound like worthwhile updates, some of them have been asked about constantly for the last few years since the last store update went live.

Please remember that after the update goes live (depending on when that is) Enhanced Steam will probably take a couple of days or weeks to get updated to fix any issues. It's a shame that Valve won't let me take a crack at it beforehand, even under NDA.
 

kafiend

Member
Man, people have a warped view of Old Steam. While the average quality of each release was obviously higher, it was really awful when excellent games were denied a release for weeks/months/years just because they didn't get enough press or some random Valve employee didn't notice it.

Continue to release EVERYTHING, but improve visibility of quality games on the storefront and provide more tools for each user to tailor the games that appear. So yeah, it sounds like they have some good ideas.

Steam is full of shovelware in full view of its users, equally tiered with great games hidden amongst the more numerous dogshit. That is not a fun time for someone looking to buy good quality games.
 
Steam, for as long as its allowed "any old crap" on its store has been crap. For sure its reduced the amount of stuff that I buy. These days I barely, if at all, pay attention to Steam as a release platform. Improve the overall quality of the releases and I'd probably take it more seriously.

Nah, if people want that they can go use GOG. Steam does have a lot of trash currently but I'd rather have that than a more strict store.
 

epmode

Member
Steam is full of shovelware in full view of its users, equally tiered with great games hidden amongst the more numerous dogshit. That is not a fun time for someone looking to buy good quality games.
Who decides what's a good game and what shouldn't be allowed on Steam?

Improving the visibility of good games on the storefront would accomplish the same thing you want without inadvertantly taking niche games away from the people that want to play them.

If having every possible game released on Steam also results in a garbage developer getting some money from their awful releases, shrug. That's why we have refunds.
 

jediyoshi

Member
I couldn't give a toss about anything to do with curators, it's been a useless feature from conception.

It works by virtue of you using it to begin with, what are you actually expecting of it not using it? If they limited releases on Steam, you'd just end up with them doing curation (but a shittier net result for devs), same difference. Do you not find out about new releases when browsing GAF topics?
 

kafiend

Member
Who decides what's a good game and what shouldn't be allowed on Steam?

Improving the visibility of good games on the storefront would accomplish the same thing you want without inadvertantly taking niche games away from the people that want to play them.

If having every possible game released on Steam also results in a garbage developer getting some money from their awful releases, shrug. That's why we have refunds.

Its a problem that as end users/buyers we should not be making a decision on. As a release platform, Steam should not be a free for all. It should be curated.
 
It works by virtue of you using it to begin with, what are you actually expecting of it not using it? If they limited releases on Steam, you'd just end up with them doing curation (but a shittier net result for devs), same difference. Do you not find out about new releases when browsing GAF topics?

I can tell if a game isn't FNAF, or 'hodor'. Sensible, reasoned curator groups is fine. When you get a load of joke groups, it's just clutter. That's no good for anyone, whether you use forums or not.
 

TheSeks

Blinded by the luminous glory that is David Bowie's physical manifestation.
"Curators being more an eyesore."

ButWhy.gif
 
Its a problem that as end users/buyers we should not be making a decision on.

Completely disagree. The end user/buyer should be the decider on whether the game is worth a purchase or not. A gatekeeper is not needed, although I'm all for top-selling releases being given more viewing space.
 

SapientWolf

Trucker Sexologist
Steam is full of shovelware in full view of its users, equally tiered with great games hidden amongst the more numerous dogshit. That is not a fun time for someone looking to buy good quality games.
To be fair, No Man's Sky isn't on the home page anymore.
 

jblank83

Member
Completely disagree. The end user/buyer should be the decider on whether the game is worth a purchase or not. A gatekeeper is not needed, although I'm all for top-selling releases being given more viewing space.

I agree.

Valve absolutely should not be saying "you're not good enough / big enough / interesting enough to be on our store". **** that. It would destroy some of the richness of Steam.

Don't like the games? Don't buy them.

The only thing Valve should do is make it easier to find the types of games YOU are interested in.
 

Nzyme32

Member
I can tell if a game isn't FNAF, or 'hodor'. Sensible, reasoned curator groups is fine. When you get a load of joke groups, it's just clutter. That's no good for anyone, whether you use forums or not.

And that is a good reason not to change that system - which is what this update does amongst other things?

So far, everything mentioned only refers to users following "one or more" curators having anything shown to them. Considering the Global Preferences that are being used in this update, I don't see why they couldn't do a similar thing for excluding curators / showing none if none are followed.
 
As a release platform, Steam should not be a free for all. It should be curated.

Again: who are you to decide what does and does not "deserve" to be on Steam? What constitutes a video game? This is some GG level bullshit, just to let you know.

You're getting an option to personally filter out what you don't want to see. That's as good as you are going to get.
 
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