Valve has answered the call of Steam users who have been complaining about the store’s weak recommendation feed and its tendency to showcase only the most popular titles. Thanks to several new algorithmic changes, users will now see results that are better personalized and less biased.
The latter happened due to a bug that emphasized top-rated games and a too-narrow timescale for calculating popularity. In a post-fix experiment, Valve saw “a 75% increase in the number of unique games visited, and a 48% increase in the average visits per game.”
Store areas driven by Tags, such as “More Like This,” saw increases in purchase and wishlisting across a broader set of games. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, but by increasing qualitative specificity and showing a wider range of titles, more customers found things they didn’t know they wanted.