I thought I’d share this because it captures the state of the market right now, as seen by a game developer and someone in games media. I know some of you are tempted to say, “it didn’t do everything right, because it didn’t do X”, but I kept the original title. What I found to be particularly noteworthy was that they both seemed to agree that one of the biggest problems is market saturation, with just an unending stream of great games to play that makes it difficult for all of them to find their audience. And then that too has knock-on effects with funding and investment.
One reason could be that Steam sucks ass at recommending games and I have no idea how they still have not figured it out.
Since the sale started, half my homepage is games I ALREADY OWN or are already on my wishlist. It also keeps recommending me games from publishers I blocked. At any given point, 80~90% of my homepage is useless.
It’s almost as if there’s some kind of hidden setting stopping small games from showing up in my recommendations. If I don’t actively browse tags I’m interested or pay attention to communities outside of Steam, I miss out on a lot.
They have an incentive to put games in front of you that they think you’ll like, so I figure it really just is tough. Their hit rate isn’t so bad for me, and what I hear about console storefronts is that the recommendations are even worse. Regardless of platform, relying on a recommendation engine to get word out about your game strikes me as a bad idea. But speaking for myself, I played 18 games that came out this year and easily left at least that many others behind just because there isn’t enough time to play through them all.
I swear 95% of the stuff Steam recommended is reasoned with because it is popular and not because it’s something I would play.
Even when they say it’s related to a library item, it’s not even tangential. Like… Escape the Backrooms is not like Terraria. In any sense. They put that there because Youtubers are selling it.
I get the impression that “online coop” is a tag it weighs very, very heavily, along with most of the “open world survival craft” subtags. Terraria, Factorio and some other games you can put 1000 hours into while optionally playing with a friend are absolute poison for the algorithm, they share a lot of tags with stuff like Rust and V Rising even though they’re not remotely the same game.
If it’s anything at all like the recommendation algorithm that Netflix popularized, it’s that they have tags in common (maybe even as simple as “online multiplayer” if they set a threshold on some value too low) and that people who played one had a decent enough overlap with people who played the other.
Impressive, what’s the genre breakdown on the 18 games you played?
It’s probably easier if I just list the titles. I’ve already got them ranked. I enjoyed all of these games, and none of them were stinkers.
Nice. RPGs in particular seem to be having a good time recently. Lots of well-received games in the previous 2~3 years.
99.9% of all games are useless to an individual, whem stean can get 10% correct, when you do close to no cooperation, this is an achievement.