Steam is the best platform for game discovery, says former Valve dev, but that's awful news for the industry: "They're pretty bad at introducing the uninitiated consumer to new games"

Steam Labs co-creator and industry veteran Ichiro Lambe has a big problem with game discoverability, something Steam Labs tries to address in its experimental features for browsing. The problem is: game discovery sucks.

"No, Game Discovery Actually Is Broken," reads the title for a LinkedIn post Lambe made on December 10. He explains, "I see studios going out of business because their games are failing to reach their target audiences. The discovery ecosystem is more broken now than I've ever seen it in my decades in the industry."

Having worked at Valve with the explicit task of improving its game discovery features with Steam Labs, Lambe is confident "Steam's discovery (my meager contributions aside) is miles ahead of every other media platform, but I also think – and I say this with love – that that's like saying they're the tallest hobbit."

He observes that storefronts don't actually want users to discover new games – they want the opposite to be true, for players to already know what they want so that they can simply log on and check out.

"Storefronts are built to be bottom of funnel: 'You're interested in this game? Let's get you to the buy button,' says Lambe. "They're pretty bad at introducing the uninitiated consumer to new games." What's the fix, then? Spending more time on Steam's new and trending lists, I guess, at your own risk.

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