I was browsing Steam this morning, as I do every day, looking at my every growing wishlist and wondering what to buy next. During the recent Steam Summer Sale, I had some money to burn on games but I was struggling to work out which game to prioritise. Did I want a small game that I could knock over in a couple of hours, or did I want a slow-burn story-rich epic adventure?? When I made that decision, I then hummed and harred over what genre I wanted to play in. Did I want to play scifi or post apocalyptic… but then cyberpunk is totally in right now. Argh too many choices, and I ended up not buying anything! Well, Steam has an answer to help with that, along with a couple of other nifty little features called Steam Labs Experiments.
“Every year, we create dozens of experiments around discoverability, video, machine learning, and more. You know who we thought might enjoy seeing them? Everyone. For the first time, you can try, share, and break them, then share your feedback with the developers who create them.”
They are currently offering three experiments:
- Micro Trailers – A six-second trailer for every Steam game
- Interactive Recommender – Machine learning predicts games you’d like based on your library.
- Automatic Show – An automated, daily, half-hour show about Steam games
The one that is going to potentially help me with my game selection plight is the Interactive Recommender. This is how it works – “For this experiment, we look at your play history and generate a list of titles personalized just for you. You can browse well-known titles or hunt for hidden gems with the popularity slider. If you’re just looking for newer titles, you can also adjust the time window of the results. And if you’re in the mood for a specific genre, you can filter down by tag too.” I let Steam do it’s thing to my game library and below are the results.
You can see on the left the games that I have the most hours in which include RPGs, aRPGs, MMORPG’s (I think I like RPGs!), amongst others down the list that I couldn’t fit in the screenshot. I also adjusted the ‘older/newer’ slide to include games that are 5 years old (it defaulted to 10 years old) and I have to say, I’m pretty impressed with my results! You can see that all games above are on my wishlist as I’m genuinely interested in them, except for Elder Scrolls Online (I play this, just not in Steam) and Mutant Year Zero (I play this on Xbox). So for me, this is a bloody perfect experiment that has passed with flying colours. The games above are indeed ones that I was hovering over in the recent Steam Summer sale, I just couldn’t figure out which one to play first. Well, now I can confidently look to purchase The Bards Tale IV: Barrows Deep when I next have some disposable income.
What about you, did this Steam experiment work for you and your steam library/wishlist? Let us know over in the Game on AUS – God Mode Facebook group.
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