Steam Labs

I'd prefer if Valve made games again tbh.

It looks nice.
Get to see what the game is about faster just to get a general idea( might lose some features as it isn´t the full trailer) and the interactive recommender might come in handy to predict your next game that you probably never heard about and might end up liking it

People always complain that our storefront has a ton of issues with all these algorithms we set up and demand us to hire personnel to sort shit out.

→ Solution:

We fire up a webpage that shows what kind of algorithms we are trying to make to help with the issues! We are so good at reading our users.

So far I consider it pretty awesome. Especially the popular-niche slider makes a huge difference to discover new games.
With mid settings I got several wishlisted games suggested, so the system isn't failing completely for sure. And there is plenty enough new to discover.

Kind of amusing that I already own all the listed wishlisted games, I just didn't activate any of them yet.

View attached image.

uh!

trying the Recommender and playing with "Popularity" slider: ---> Niche all the way!

• The 6-second trailers suck. They really don't show enough to be able to identify what sets a specific game apart from the rest. Also, they way they're cut and spliced haphazardly indicates that this is lazy bot work.
  All I learned from those is that some Chinese folk have decided to steal/clone Rogue Legacy. (Speaking of which, get Rogue Legacy, the game's still ace 6 years after release.)

• The automated show is just a bunch of those 6-second trailers slapped together by a bot. Doesn't improve them in any meaningful way.

• The interacive recommender shows promise, even though it's probably just handing the users more control over the existing algorithms the store pages already use.. Limiting to games that are max. 10 years old is a bit daft though.

Okay, so there's three new marketing ideas and I already dislike all three of them.

• 001 Micro Trailers: I usually only check out the videos after ruling out still images for a game. A few pictures usually tell me more about the concept and the interface than the best made trailer. If I'm still interested after seeing the images and ruling out stuff by genre/tags, I might mwatch the full trailer, the whole micro trailer concept seems pretty useless to me.

• 002 Interactive Recommender: That's about the VERY LAST thing I'd want or need. More surveillance on how I spend my time and ai based behavior analysis in order to sell stuff to me. Steam already collects too much data as it is.

• 003 Automatic Show: that's about the second last thing I need. Another stupid video show. All that trendy youtubve channel stuff is disgusting enough already. if there's any news about new releases and such, I'll learn it soon enough don't need a show for that and I certainly won't watch it 30 minutes a day.

They were testing those micro-trailers during the Steam sale (though only on featured games).
I think it's a brilliant idea, and saves me some time going to a game's store page to check it out.

After trying the Recommender and the Automatic Show, I've already found a couple really cool looking games I hadn't heard about.

They may not be features I'll use all the time (old habits are hard to break), but I can certainly see myself using them every now and then to find new games I may have missed elsewhere.

INTERACTIVE RECOMMENDER: only trash edition )))

any thoughts?

Looks like everyone wants their own crazy killer robot that tries to read people's minds

Interactive Recommender - Machine learning predicts games you'd like based on your library.

The automatic show bot sucks... At the 8:10 mark going through strategy games and it shows Pay for picture Vol.01 lol

I have mixed feelings so far:

1) Shorter trailers could be better, or they could be the same; what we need is better trailers, and that's up to the developers. I've seen games with 6 or 7 of the damn things, and not one of them shows a scrap of gameplay; it's all "BWAAAAAAAAA LOOK HOW EPIC I AM EPIC AND SWEEPING CAMERAS AND LOTS OF STRING INSTRUMENTS AND DRUMS!" There isn't a single second, much less six, of that that's remotely helpful to anyone.

2) I usually laugh at recommendation features, but there's one thing that I really like about the interactive recommender: the fact it has a popularity slider. So many places give you recommendations for the hottest new games, but anyone who has any kind of knowledge about video games already knows everything they need about those games already; I want to hear about the more obscure stuff that the big companies aren't already cramming down my throat. Even slid to the more popular side (just to the right of the R), the list has a decent handful of games that either interest me or I have DRM-free from another PC distributor, so it's not terrible at its job. That said, the closer I go to niche, the fewer games look interesting to me. What worries me is whether or not this uses tags, because tags on Steam are absolutely broken at this point; I can think of 3 off the top of my head that have become totally meaningless. The other thing that bothers me a little is that it uses how much you've played a game. Ideally, that's a good idea, but Yakuza 0 weighs in at about 108 hours because it has a LOT of content; Broken Reality is one of my favorite games on Steam so far, but I've played it for 90 hours fewer, because that's about all the content it has.

3) I imagine that one would only learn about great new games from an automated show by sheer coincidence; I'm not convinced.

Micro Trailers - Looks like a good idea, although the page layout is terrible, I hope they change it.

Interactive Recommender - I'll pass. Seems like it's a discovery queue 2.0, and I already don't use the queue so...

Automatic Show - Considering half of whatever's released on Steam everyday has "hentai" in its name I'm disabling this "feature" as soon as it goes live.

I tried all 3 of them. Microtrailers and automated show are the same thing. Both completely useless. The slider one is a bit better, but would need a lot more options. It keeps suggesting bullet hells for me and I hate them. I cannot exclude them because I've already used this option to hide F2P...

There are a few things an AI will never be able to do better than a human and this is one of them. Curators was a very good idea, but poorly implemented. For now, I'd rather stick with a handful of youtubers.

I don't see how a 6 second trailer is going to convince anyone of buying a game.

I've only ever played 3 visual novels with none of them being in my top 25 most played games and that's all I get in my recommendations. I'd need a visual novel filter to use it.

I like the recommender--found so many games that I would be interested in. Works so much better than the discovery queue.
However, imo, it shouldn't show the games you already have on your wishlist.

I would prefer an enhancement of the review system instead, not only locked to the binary "Thumb up/Thumb down".

I like 4-panel micro trailers if it's not for action games. Adventure, point'n'click, VNs, indie — you see art style, characters, a bit of gameplay — it's almost enough for decision to open store page or not.

Also, lol :

View attached image.

are steam gona give something for klicking this useless stuff?

I won't lie, I have no bloody idea what's this whole "Steam Lab" idea about :D I read a few lines, didn't see anything I would need or want (might be just me though).

I feel like people who complain about 6 second trailer didnt even check it out.
It is enough for you to decide whether to click on the game or not... Then you can jump in and watch the full trailer and other stuff. Especially if you previously checked out still pictures from the game before checking out the trailer. This 6 sec trailer is upgraded version of stills beside trailers.

Im very picky towards games I play. And countless times Ive opened the store page, waited for trailer to load and found out its a some kind of game I have no interest in. Those 6 seconds can show you crucial gameplay. I mean if Im looking for some third person shooter and hovering over the game it shows me top down anime dating sim, Im not opening it. Of course that is exaggeration but you get the point.

Not exactly interested in those other features so Im not going to comment on those..

Updates:

1. New search "experiment".
2. Deep dive bell (by Lars Doucet) announced.
3. Short trailers expanded to entire Steam not just chosen titles...