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.
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.