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Dozens of indie developers have told me that Steam is significantly better for game visibility and discoverability than every other platform and storefront, and Valve's latest addition to Steam's recommendation market could put it even further ahead. Its latest update added "Personal Calendars" that provide a day-by-day view of recent and upcoming games that Valve thinks you'll like, and it's pretty sleek so far.
Announced in a recent blog post, Steam's Personal Calendar, which you can pull up here, collects anywhere from 10 to 500 games "that have released recently, or are coming soon."
Much like some of Steam's other algorithmic marquees and feeds, your Personal Calendar picks are "based on games you play a lot." Valve "finds people with similar playtime profiles to you, and then looks at the games those players have been adding to their wishlist." Your own wishlist is also factored in, of course.
"This recommendation system gets re-trained daily to incorporate the latest data," Valve says. "In reality you aren't likely to see your recommendations change all that much from day to day, but as time goes by you will obviously see new things pop up as the 8-week horizon of the calendar marches forward, or as games lock in their release dates."
Valve says it was "drawn to the idea of having a visual representation of upcoming releases" to better convey how fresh or close a specific game is. With this calendar, you can see now daily, weekly, and monthly breakdowns clearly demonstrating just how impossible it is to keep up with all the games coming out (even when thousands of those games don't even get enough attention and make enough money to cover the $100 Steam submission fee).
From my cursory experiments, the default game count of 100 games feels like the sweet spot. Going to 250 or 500 turns the calendar into an intimidating, hard-to-parse scroll of, well, hundreds of games. With 100, I still get a healthy smattering of games, but it's also pretty legible.
Tomorrow, October 23, my calendar tells me that action roguelike Godbreakers is out. Valve must have read how much I liked the demo. On Friday, we've got gambling roguelike Slots & Daggers, which quickly won Ali over. November 5 has roguelike strategy game Vivid World, November 6 has instant-banger Unbeatable, November 10 will see cyberpunk deckbuilder Into the Grid, and November 19 has Demonschool and Moonlighter 2.
But those are all games I've wishlisted. It's nice to see their release dates at a glance, and to catch up on the last month of releases at the same time, but will this calendar help me find new games? Yeah, probably.
You can mouse over the games on the calendar to preview trailers without opening a new page, which is nice. A quick glance at my recommendations has added yet more games to my wishlist – sci-fi immersive sim Ambrosia Sky and cute action RPG The Lonesome Guild – and I can see myself checking this calendar fairly regularly to get a bird's eye view of the surrounding weeks. Even if monitoring trending games wasn't part of my job, I think it would still be pretty handy.
For a work-in-progress tool that's still being ironed out in the Steam Labs, the calendar is pretty solid. You can filter by genre tags if you find yourself hankering for an RPG, FPS, co-op game, or something else. And if you don't want Valve's input, you can cut it down to just the games you've wishlisted.
"Really, we're interested to know whatever feedback you may have about this experiment," Valve says. "Do you find this format of recommendations to be useful? What do you think about this new set of recommendations and calendar view? Are there other things we should include on the calendar? Does it seem to be generating good recommendations for you?"
I realize this is all in service of getting Steam users to spend more money that Valve gets a cut of, but the fact of the matter is, nobody does game visibility like Steam, and features like this only further demonstrate that. Dave Oshry, head of boomer shooter powerhouse New Blood Interactive, shared Valve's calendar reveal and put it this way: "They just keep winning."
