Valve Shares New Steam Statistics After New Update


Valve Corporation, the developers behind Steam as well as many other games and their related tournaments, have released new statistics regarding Steam after the release of the Discovery Update. When the Discovery Update was released, it changed the layout of Steam and highlighted more obscure games that players may like, as well as showing off more games than Steam had prior to the update.

Steam developer Tom Giardino released the report through the SteamworksDev group on Reddit, and detailed exactly how the Discovery Update changed Steam, a platform where developers can release games on the PC, and where players can keep a library of all their games without the need for physical discs.

“Prior to the Discovery Update, the [front page carousel of games that we refer to as the main capsule] could only show 10-to-20 games per day to every user. [That was] regardless of what those customers owned, what they played, and what they liked. As a result of the changes introduced with the Steam Discovery Update, now over 4,000 unique titles are shown and clicked on via the main cap every day.”

Giardino also wrote about how clicks on the Main Capsule main up about a quarter of all clicks on the Steam homepage, which was an increase of around four percent before the update, which Giardino, as well as everybody else at Steam and Valve, have agreed is more than likely due to the new layout.

“This strong increase in interaction demonstrates that customers are finding the personalized main capsule more relevant and valuable.”

But he said that it’s difficult for Steam to tell if they’re really making a difference. Valve cannot tell if gamers go to a product page and decide to buy a game or not because an outfit like PC Gamerrecommends it. The company is working on developing new ways to track that kind of data.

“[What] we do know is that 3.1 million unique users have found their way to a store page via a curator, which means they were browsing the list of curators, or they saw the curator’s recommendation in their activity feed.”

Curators are accounts which are often run by prominent organisations or people within the gaming community. However, Valve says that while a lot of people have used curators to discover games, they haven’t done so on a regular basis.

“The day-to-day interactions [with curators] are not as high as we’d like,” wrote Giardino. “And we know we need to make some changes to better expose curators. We think the general notion of editorialized and community-curated content has a lot of potential to help users discover new content and make better informed decisions, but we still have work to do to make better use of information generated by curators.”

[Image via VG247.]

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