Steam Will Now Use Machine Learning To Improve Game Recommendations

Steam Will Now Use Machine Learning To Improve Game Recommendations

Steam Will Now Use Machine Learning To Improve Game Recommendations

Today, Valve announced a new subset of features for Steam called Steam Labs. The trailers are displayed in small thumbnails that play in loops, much like what happens when you mouse over a thumbnail on YouTube. This section, called Steam Labs, now has three such experiments available: one called Micro Trailers; another called Interactive Recommender; and a last called Automatic Show. This should help developers quickly convey what they want to about a game without investing in a fancy trailer.

The first experiment is "Micro Trailers", which are "six-second [trailers] for every game". In addition, many indie creators have decried a seeming lack of discoverability on Steam, claiming their games are all but impossible to market on the platform.

Micro Trailers are their short-six-second game trailers whereas The Interactive Recommender uses machine learning to recommend new games based on your top-played games and the Automated show is a half-hour showcase of the latest Steam games, generated through Steam's algorithm.


Once enabled by the user, micro trailers become available in various locations on Steam's website. It is probably not sufficient to get sense of those video games, typically, however it's in all probability sufficient that can assist you resolve if you would like to know extra. Users can refine those results by including or excluding certain tags, searching for titles that released within a specified time frame, and adjusting a niche vs mainstream slider.

Valve has just made their digital storefront Steam a lot more interesting. (We had nothing to do with the PC Gamer curator web page being featured on the Steam Labs web page, however hey, cool).

The third, called the Automatic Show, looks like the least useful.

As Steam points out, none of these features are final. Steam, which is now the largest PC gaming client, gives users recommendations on what to play next.

For context, Steam recently held its annual summer sale, and, as always, simply providing most of its considerable inventory at a discount wasn't enough for Valve.

Valve also appears to appeal to developers by noting that the model does not require developer optimization, "The best way for a developer to optimize for this model is to make a game that people enjoy playing".

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