
Steam Labs - danso
https://store.steampowered.com/labs
======
viraptor
I love the recommender experiment with a "popular-niche" slider. I want this
slider almost everywhere when not searching for a very specific thing I'm
already aware of. It was a great feature in last.fm, and I miss it in other
streaming platforms.

This is especially useful in something like steam, where you get the front
page full of suggestions... that you've likely already seen many times, or
heard about because everybody played them. I can't find anything interesting
on the normal recommendations, but after going 100% niche I've added 3 games
(from 2014-2016) to my wishlist.

~~~
ldoughty
still cant separate out co-op story from co-op because of multiplayer :-/

Why is it so hard to find story co-op games... always MMORPGs, RTSs, or
sandbox games. Battleblock theater and pit people were fantastic co-op games..
and stuff like Halo's co-op campaign was great :-/

~~~
phalangion
Lovers in a dangerous spacetime, Magicka, Rampage Knights, Borderlands,
Monaco. Those are a few I have enjoyed.

~~~
neuronexmachina
Some more story co-op games to add: Guacamelee (co-op metroidvania), any of
the Lego games, Trine

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Razengan
It's bizarre that the digital stores of multi-billion dollar corporations
_still_ can't seem able to get _discovery_ down perfectly.

Steam seems better off than the rest, and I can't comment on Google Play or
Xbox Marketplace but on the App Store, Nintendo eShop and PlayStation Store,
it's still hard to discover what you're looking for if you don't already know
about it.

For example, all RPG games like Baldur's Gate, or platformers in a pixel-art
style with chiptune music. The best way that I know of for discovering all
such games is to search for a name that I already know, and look in the
Similar or "Also Bought" list on its product page. Of course even then their
algorithms don't list all relevant games and are often swamped with
microtransaction-loaded crapware/copycats.

YouTube suffers from the same sickness, and Google Search itself has been
dumbed down over the past few years.

Is it deliberate? Are they afraid that rivals and "researchers" will get too
much information about their business if their search and filter functionality
was "too" powerful, or that users might leave sooner after they get exactly
what they came for?

(I know I can use third-party sites like itch.io to discover games, but this
is about the app stores' built-in functionality.)

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's not in the interest of the stores to let you efficiently find just what
you need - this would deprive them of revenue from errors and impulsive
purchases, and would reduce the time you're spending in store, exposed to
various form of advertising.

Stores are not a good product discovery mechanism.

~~~
tjoff
Or you know, they are just bad at it. It is quite apparent when you consider
the allround quality of the stores.

They all have a monopoly in their field and barely anything they do will
improve or diminish their revenue. So they just don't care.

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renjimen
Great that they're experimenting with content discovery mechanisms.
Unfortuntely, with these micro trailers they seem to be going the same route
as Netflix: enticing people with flashiness alone.

I think most people will go to the reviews section or an aggregator website
like Metacritic before they purchase a game. Why not include that information
up front along side the flashy visuals? Surely that would reward talented
developers while giving users the best possible experience.

~~~
stuffbyspencer
I like the idea of having metacritic and more review-oriented info upfront
near games. There's currently a few browser extensions that solve these
issues. Valve would benefit from reaching out to these developers and
implementing some of these features directly into the storefront. [ although,
I get that it's a balance of keeping it feature-full + lightweight ]

~~~
Nullabillity
Steam at least used to include the metacritic score on the storefront page
(though never as prominently as their own tomatoes-esque system).

~~~
renjimen
Yeah, Steam does a good job at the moment of including user and professional
reviews on the game pages. The fact they let you sort and filter game searches
by average review is great. Also, the tools to track changes in reviews over
time is really useful to see how early access games are changing during
development.

Here's hoping for more in the same vein!

------
stuffbyspencer
> We're always trying new things with Steam, but often only share them with
> the world when they're ready to be made a part of the platform. Steam Labs
> allows us to share these ideas earlier

...Steam has just entered the fabled early access phase :O

lol, for real this seem neat. In regards to the current 3 experiments: MICRO-
TRAILERS] this is a cool idea, I like when YouTube implemented a similar
concept. My only hesitation with this, though, is it appears to just grab from
a random point in the game trailer. The thing I don't like about some of the
game's trailers I visit is it takes so long to show any real gameplay or,
worse of all, shows no gameplay at all. A novel, yet to be fair tough to
manage, alternative would be to allow users to submit recorded gameplay clips,
and have the community vote on the best "representative" clips, and show those
instead. My personally favorite is the 2x2 grid for curators.

INTERACTIVE RECOMMENDER] this is dope. I love this. It probably won't become
my default way to discover, but I can easily see myself using this either once
a week, or whenever I feel like spending some money. As a Linux user, I'd like
the ability to filter by OS, but otherwise this is, again, dope.

AUTOMATIC SHOW] I like the base concept, but I can't see myself sitting
through 30 minutes of its current iteration. The mockup video with the
voiceover definitely is more appealing to me, I'm excited to see with how they
progress with robotic voice over. Honestly, even if the robo-voice sounds
stilted and odd, I think that could add to the charm. Don't try to act like a
real human is behind the videos, embrace the concept of a robot tirelessly
producing these daily [ or weekly / whatever ] videos. Sorta like a Toonami
vibe. Tom was awesome! Also, it'd be nice to split the videos into separate
entities. One video for overall games, one video showcasing strategy, etc.
Having to skip around in a 30 minute video to find the parts I care about is
needless. Either split them up & let me choose, or develop an easy-to-use
playback controller that lets me auto-skip to the parts that I'd be interested
in. Like scene-selection on DVDs.

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worldsayshi
I don't get why steam doesn't implement GameSpy like features. That is, a
common lobby that list (and allow you to join) public multiplayer sessions for
all steam games that you own.

It would make it possible to revive quite a few of those "dead" niche
multiplayer games. And greatly engage the steam users around the steam games.

~~~
TulliusCicero
Probably difficult to get developers for "dead" games to bother integrating
with the API.

~~~
lozenge
A lot of games are passionate creations and the creators would happily put a
few hours in to report info to Steam servers if they thought it would double
multiplayer use for another year or so at the end of a game's life.

It's the franchises which consider games dead after dropping the sequel, ie
Call of Duty, FIFA etc. They want people to buy the next version every year
regardless of whether the game is actually better enough to justify the cost.

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jccalhoun
The recommendations is pretty good but it is limited because a lot of the
games it recommended me were games that I had bought through GOG, Epic, or
other places. If it could pick up that I have a game on other stores it would
be more useful.

~~~
Faark
Yeah, maybe a third of them did I play _elsewhere_. But I consider this a
signal on how good the commender already is.

Don't think there is a good way for steam to pick that up automatically
without it being a privacy nightmare. An "I played that" button would be nice,
help steam improve/validate recommendations and might even be used to
advertise new content / sequels / etc.

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wiradikusuma
Since we're talking about Steam... is there any way to check _in my library_:
which ones are RPG, which ones are 3D and visually stunning (I just bought a
fancy card and want to test drive)? API is fine.

~~~
cyunem
To avoid the hassle of categorising games manually, I've been using
[https://github.com/Depressurizer/Depressurizer](https://github.com/Depressurizer/Depressurizer)
It took me a couple of tries to get a functioning setup with an older version,
but it's working now and they seem to have improved the UI a bit. It allows
automatically making categories in your library based on genres and user-
defined tags from steam as well as some other things like ratings and time to
beat

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getlawgdon
I like this a lot. What are some other sandboxes like this?

