Steam - Curator Update

HiddenX

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The Steam Curator features will be updated this Fall:

Steam Curator Update - Coming This Fall

For the past few months we've been busy working on significant improvements and additions to the Steam Curator system. There's still some work to be done before we can roll these out, but we wanted to share a bit about why we see Steam Curators as a crucial component to exploring Steam, and what changes we're making.

Why Steam Curators?
We've heard from many of you that you want to have a more curated experience when shopping Steam; where the titles that are surfaced and recommended and highlighted are picked by humans that you know and trust. But, we also know that players have different tastes in games, so it's unlikely that any single person or group could cater to the specific interests of every player in the world. This is why we believe that Valve can't be the only form of curation in Steam - we would be under serving the tastes and viewpoints of many players.

So, we're focusing on how to support the streamers, journalists, critics, content creators, writers, enthusiasts, and friends that you already know and trust to be able to help you find your next favorite game. By following a few Curators on Steam, you'll not only start to see their recommendations appear prominently when browsing the Steam Store, but you can also explore each of their customized spaces within Steam and see all the titles they have reviewed.

Using the Steam Curator features on Steam is an opt-in thing. If you’re not interested in the opinions of human beings helping you find games that are worth your attention, then we also have some powerful features coming just for you. We’re hard at work on significant improvements to the core recommendation engine which algorithmically suggests games for all Steam users. We’re anxious to talk in depth about that technology too, and will do so in a future blog post.

What changes are coming?
Over the three years since introduction of Steam Curators, we've gathered a lot of feedback from all kinds of perspectives. We've heard from players, from curators, from streamers, from game developers, and from all kinds of other tastemakers and content creators. The feedback is clear that the system needs to do a bunch of things better in order to work well for the three primary sets of people it's trying to serve: players, curators, and game developers.

Players
This system really only works if players find value from following some Curators. So we're adding to the kinds of content that Curators are able to create, and increasing the places within Steam where that content can be seen.
Recommendations provided by Steam Curators can already appear in the main featured spot on your Steam Home page as well as in a dedicated space on your home page. We're building on this so that recommendations by Curators you follow will also show up at the top of tag and genre pages. This means as you explore, say the Free To Play page, you'll see recommendations from your Curators for Free to Play games. If you are browsing RPG games, you'll see RPG games featured from Curators you follow. And so forth.
Many Curators create videos to accompany their reviews, so we'll now start embedding those videos in a few places alongside the curation. This means that when you click through a recommendation, or when you browse a Curator's page on Steam, you'll be able to watch their videos in-line.
We also know that some Curators will review games within certain themes, genres, or franchises. So, we're adding a new feature for Curators to create lists of games they've reviewed that go together. These can be used to create lists such as "best couch co-op games", "games with amazing Workshop support", "games by my favorite designer", "10 games to play while waiting for Witcher 4", or any other set of interesting ways to organize groups of games.
And if you are looking to find new new Curators that share your tastes, or offer unique information about particular kinds of games, you can explore the 'Recommended Curators' or 'Top Curators' lists. We're fine-tuning the 'Recommended Curators' section to more accurately suggest Curators who recommend games like those you've been playing.

Curators
One of the pieces of feedback we received from Curators was that they felt it needed to be more rewarding and meaningful for a Curator to spend the time it takes to build and maintain their curation. So there are a few new things we're building to tackle this.
As we mentioned above, Curators that produce videos as part of their reviews will be see those videos embedded right next to their review in Steam. If you're a Curator who's already doing work to create content elsewhere, we want you to be able to use that work in your Steam curation. This means a few of the most popular video formats such as YouTube, nicovideo.jp, youku.com, and bilibili.com will appear right in Steam where players can easily watch them.
Curators will be able to customize and brand their home on Steam by selecting games, lists, and tags to feature and by uploading a personalized background.
We all know that graphs solve everything, so yes, we're adding more of them. In particular, Curators will be able to see how their reviews impacted their follower's behavior in the Steam store.
We are helping connect developers with Curators that are most likely to have relevant audience of followers for the developers' game. More on this below.
[...]
Thanks henriquejr!

More information.
 
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Tastemakers?? New word for me.

We're fine-tuning the 'Recommended Curators' section to more accurately suggest Curators who recommend games like those you've been playing.
Interesting, I wonder how they will do this? My first thought would be to check the player's hours in each game against the average player's hours and, if the player has more than the average, assume the player likes the game. (If the player has done a review then that score trumps the hours guess.) Then compare the games the player likes against curators to see who matches the player's tastes best. That'd work great for me but, unfortunately, the vast majority of Steam users have very few games.

I'm a bit worried about the "most popular" curators. The more important curation gets, the more publishers will be tempted to pay the curators off. We've already seen it in YouTube videos. (You hang tough, HiddenX! ;))
 
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The more important curation gets, the more publishers will be tempted to pay the curators off. We've already seen it in YouTube videos. (You hang tough, HiddenX! ;))

Forget it HiddenX. Cash out and rake it in!!
 
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But, we also know that players have different tastes in games, so it's unlikely that any single person or group could cater to the specific interests of every player in the world. This is why we believe that Valve can't be the only form of curation in Steam - we would be under serving the tastes and viewpoints of many players.

Interesting statement for a company that outright REFUSED to publish Adventure games in the first place because these games - according to them - didn't fit into the taste of the players.
 
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And yet, the review "editor" is still a bare bones, not even WYSIWYG editor where you have to manually type stuff like {b} {b/} for good formatting.
WTF?!
 
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Interesting statement for a company that outright REFUSED to publish Adventure games in the first place because these games - according to them - didn't fit into the taste of the players.
I'm afraid or worry of/about Steam but on that you can only accept they learned from their errors.

People believing Steam is a sort of saint obsessed to please players and be at their service are naive, Steam is just about making money.

After some troubles with Steam I decided minimize my bought on their shop but still buy much more digital with Steam key than without. So at first only Steam allowed some chance of refund after a quick try, it's a clear attempt to push players to buy games only to Steam. And then consumers not buying them directly a game became second grade citizen whose votes and reviews aren't count. It's a sort of pressure to push buy games only to them, and their explanation of this design choice is a ridiculous explanation.

Nope Steam is greedy and no saint. They are just looking to sell more and more, and sometimes or often it cross interest of a majority of players, it's nothing more. But they are smart and if they can sell Adventure games they'll do it.

Now for their requirement for minimum number of sells a game should have, their standard are pretty low and they blow out most of concurrence. Even if I stick to pure indie games low budget, I bet that now even indie specialized sites don't have a larger indie choice but through ton of total crap.

The problem they need to manage is that a user shouldn't feel overloaded by new releases. So they need offer filter systems but they can't endorse too strict filter without to risk a lot of negative reactions. So curators changes could help them provide filter tools to user, so they could sell more. Again, it's smart.
 
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The Steam curation system has seemed mostly dead for a long time. I'm not surprised they want to perk it up, somehow.
 
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