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Valve has sent developers and Steam sellers an update on the impact of the new changes introduced to its online games marketplace last year.
In a blog post, replicated on Reddit, the firm reports that a combination of manually curated titles and personalised recommendations means that more games than ever are receiving strong promotions through the Steam storefront.
For example, prior to the Steam Discovery update the main capsule on the front page only showed 10 to 20 titles per day to every user, regardless of what they owned, played and liked. Now more than 4,000 titles are shown and clicked on via the main capsule every day.
Clicks on the main capsule now make up a quarter of all activity on the Steam home page, up from 21 per cent before the update.
Steam Tags have also proved to be useful, enabling customers to search and sort results to suit them. Click-throughs from tag pages increased threefold after the update, and now account for 7 per cent of all traffic to product pages.
Interestingly, the new Curators system – which allows users to create lists of recommended games – has had the impact Valve expected. 1.3m Steam users follow at least one of the 6,000-plus curators but Valve has had trouble measuring their impact on buying decisions.
“Unfortunately, the day-to-day interactions are not as high as we’d like and we know we need to make some changes to better expose curators,” the firm wrote
The post continued: “The Discovery Update has helped show off more of the Steam catalogue in a way that helps more customers find products that they are likely to enjoy and provide information necessary to make better-informed purchase decisions.
“We still think there are lots of areas for improvement, and we will continue to iterate on many on these features.”
The blog post then calls for Steamworks developers to offer feedback on what data they would want to access and what decisions they could make with it.
Steam Discovery was launched last September. We spoke to developers to gauge their initial impressions.
