Community MetaSteam | July 2020 - Blood on the Horizon

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beep boop

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Too bad. I liked the idea of deep dive, and it came up with a non-zero number of interesting suggestions. More than the interactive recommender anyway. Like why does that thing not have infinite scroll or allow me to mark a game as not interesting to me or otherwise replace it? :thinking-face:
 
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Mor

Me llamo Willy y no hice la mili, pero vendo Chili
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Well, Steam Labs is 1 year old and we got a blog about what has been delivered, what has been shelved and what's coming in the near future, let's take a look.

Steam Labs Celebrates One Year of Experimentation
Community Recommendations launches out of Labs to Steam
This July marks the one year anniversary of [UWSL]Steam Labs[/UWSL], which launched with three experiments and big ambitions to improve Steam through public experimentation and iteration. Today we’re celebrating with the official release of [UWSL]Community Recommendations[/UWSL], introduced to Steam via Labs.

Steam Labs is a space to explore the potential for new and improved versions of Steam through inquiry, exploration, and conversation with you. The most pivotal part of our design process is the moment where you come in, and with Labs we’re able to include you much earlier. To assess what works and what doesn’t, we’ve been listening to your feedback, gathering evidence to learn how people use our experiments, and conducting A/B tests to measure relative success among potential designs.

Below is some background on what we have learned in the Labs during the past year, and how it led us to ship four experiments, shelve two, and continue to design and refine others on the way. Each has reinforced the value we derive from a participatory design process. So thanks, and cheers, to another great year of experimentation together!




Shipped Experiments
With your help, the following experiments graduated from the Labs to Steam, where they’re helping people discover and find a wider range of games.

Community Recommendations
Today’s launch out of Steam Labs, [UWSL]Community Recommendations[/UWSL] showcases your reviews by featuring them right on our home page for everyone to see. The result brings community energy to the store, enabling users to keep abreast of the titles players are currently enjoying, and why. This new feature also allows us to get out of the way as platform holders, connecting and empowering players so they can recommend games to one another directly.

Interactive Recommendations
The [UWSL]Interactive Recommender[/UWSL] began as an experiment to determine whether machine learning could be used to generate compelling personalized recommendations for players. The result is a system that trains itself to recognize gameplay patterns among the millions of players on Steam.

During experimentation, we learned that players wanted to be able to exclude games that they considered outliers or mistakes in their play history, so we added this. Additional feedback led us to include the ability to eliminate a played game from influencing recommendation results, and to ignore recommendations that you already own on another platform. We also added the ability to save your preferences and view your recommendations directly on the home page of the Steam Store.

Play Next Suggestions
After gaining confidence in machine learning through Labs experimentation, we decided to build Play Next, which leverages the same tech as the Interactive Recommender to suggest games you already own but have yet to play. After testing this version of the recommender with players in Labs, the feature moved to its current home directly in the Steam Library. There, users can add a Play Next shelf to their collection and use it to view Steam’s suggestions from their own library. These suggestions are based upon their gameplay history as it compares to millions of other players.

Powerful Search Tools
Steam Labs became the perfect place to try out some often-suggested (and much-needed) upgrades to [UWSL]Steam search[/UWSL], without altering the store during this exploratory process. A number of new tools requested by players were added, such as ways to filter results by price, view only items that are on sale, and exclude items already owned, wished-for, or ignored.

During experimentation, we tried replacing the typical paging mechanism with a format that continuously loads results as you scroll, but we learned that many players preferred the old way, and so that was turned into an option. We also learned players wanted a way to exclude results associated with tags, so variations were built and tested to make that happen. Using Search, it’s now possible to bookmark powerful, specific searches like this one, which offers direct access to [UWSL]the community’s top-rated non-violent side-scrolling platformers with support Remote Play Together with up to four friends[/UWSL].


Shelved Experiments
Steam Labs is a great place to quickly try new ideas, providing us with insight about player preferences and usage. Inevitably, not every experiment we choose to pursue will resonate with you, and so today we've shelved a couple of them to make way for new experimentation.

The Automated Show
The Automated Show was an ambitious project, with the goal of creating an entertaining production about games, built in a fully automated fashion. Formats ranged from 2 to 30 minutes and experimented with features such as typographic and motion design effects, announcer voice-overs, theme-driven automated curation, and simultaneous streams to deliver maximum information in minimal time.

User reaction quickly revealed that the longer format just wasn’t working, as viewers typically bailed within the first few minutes of those shows. We also found that each time we wanted to feature a specific selection of games, such as in the Steam Awards, we ultimately chose to hand craft it, rather than automate its creation, to achieve our communication goals.

While we remain optimistic that an automated show could one day make for a compelling way to learn about games, today is not that day. And so with film editing job security intact for the near term, we say TTFN to the Automated Show.

Deep Dive
This experiment offered a way to browse the Steam store using a favorite game as an entry point for discovering similar titles. While it was fun to discover how many degrees of separation could be found between Battle Brothers and Strikey Sisters, or to discover little known but well-loved Gems somewhat similar to a favorite popular game, we found similarity-based browsing to be a tough sell as a destination.

Perhaps the most valuable takeaway from our Deep Dive experimentation has been the idea behind its Similar Tags matching algorithm. This allows us to organize the hundreds of Steam tags into a handful of meaningful categories that can be leveraged to help gauge similarity along interesting axes like genre and mechanics.

This tag categorization work led us to identify relationships between tags, features, and other kinds of metadata associated with Steam games, resulting in our Query Expansion experiment and the Tag Wizard, a tool we built to help devs associate their games with a broad range of tags for improved discovery. It also inspired the creation of internal tools we use to identify and organize games associated with big events, and has led us to consider new navigational systems we’re excited to experiment with in Labs.


Experiments in Progress
Meanwhile, here’s a look at some promising experiments currently underway in Steam Labs. Each of these are progressing and expected to graduate to full release on Steam in the coming months.

News & Events Hub
The [UWSL]Steam News Hub[/UWSL] experiment allows players to explore a personalized feed of news, events, live-streams, and updates from games they play, follow, or wishlist. This feed can be customized to include or exclude certain types of events or sources of news. Most importantly, the experiment includes a look at what’s ahead with a reminder system that helps players keep tabs on in-game events, live-streams, and other scheduled activities.

Query Expansion
We’ve begun some important yet fairly behind-the-scenes work in this [UWSL]Steam Search[/UWSL] experiment, where we’re leveraging a custom thesaurus to define relationships between tags and related metadata for more accurate, consistent results. We’re using Steam Labs to help us gauge whether our thesaurus is working as you’d expect. You can opt into the experiment now via Labs, which then updates Search with the new logic used to derive tag-based search results.

Before calling this experiment complete, our goal is to bring this logic to more views throughout Steam, such that a search for both Real-Time and Strategy, for example, will always produce the same results as when searching for RTS. Many of our store’s browse views stand to benefit from this work.

Micro Trailers
Micro Trailers offer video snapshots of games, in just a few quick seconds. People only take a short amount of time to make judgements about what’s interesting while scrolling content, so micro trailers aim to help viewers learn enough about a game in as little time as possible. In Steam Labs, we’ve experimented with different formats, lengths, and strategies for deriving automatically-generated micro trailers from the standard game trailers our partners provide. We’ve also explored various ways of auto-assembling and aggregating these short videos, some of which admittedly made our eyes spin. 🍭🍭

Today, Micro Trailers can be found on the Steam store, where they are featured when hovering on items on the home page, in our sales events, and in the Interactive Recommender. We’re still tinkering with their optimal format, duration, and presentation, and look forward to bringing them to more places throughout Steam.


The Future
We continue to find that our work only improves with iteration based on your feedback. Steam Labs has opened the possibility of sharing more nascent ideas, receiving earlier feedback, and improving Steam with help from millions of people, like you.

News Hub Update
In a coming update, we’ll soon be adding the ability to include news from Steam Curators you follow, enabling posts from some of your favorite press outlets to appear right in your personalized view of Steam News.

New Ways to Browse
To date, we’ve invested quite a bit of energy into recommendations and search. Browsing is of course another key way people discover content on Steam, and we’re excited to explore this space. New points of entry, more compelling ways to browse, and more tools to filter while browsing are all among our list of future pursuits for Steam Labs.

Your Ideas
We of course also have our eyes on the Steam Labs Discussions, and hope you’ll continue to [UWSL]share your ideas[/UWSL] for potential experiments you’d like to see from us.


 

inky

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I liked Deep Dive, but the only game I really bought from it was Dark Quest II, a really cheap Hero Quest like indie game which is never going to find a bigger audience, and I was already aware of tangentially through the "similar games" and custom search options.

I think that contrary to what most people believe "discoverability" isn't really an issue, not even if Steam itself is really your only source for finding out about games. The issue is squarely front page visibility for indie games, and Deep Dive probably kept surfacing games that people were already aware of, even when you pushed the sliders to the extreme.

There are many games, more games worth buying than anyone can afford. It helps finding ways to keep them constantly present to potential customers, but I have never seen a game that I thought looked super cool or super niche, that wasn't already in several of my friend's wishlists by the time I check them out.

The only way I can see it, is if they make it part of the discovery queue, but that would kind of defeat the queues purpose too, which is sometimes showing you stuff you definitely don't want to see, but it's still worth for Steam to do based on store or friends tendencies. Maybe if they brought it back as a parallel queue or something. It was definitely cool though, seeing the game selection morph based on date or popularity. It was a cool reminder of how the store has progressed, and what games used to be popular by virtue of being the big fish in the small pond that was early Steam.
 

inky

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Skulls & Bones (Ubisoft pirate game) apparently being rebooted as an online service (it wasn't one already? LOL).

I remember way back when (in another forum), people adamant Sea of Thieves was dead on arrival because of this game. Got into a pretty dumb back and forth over it too, with people arguing that the differentiating characteristics of SoT (like it's cartoony look) didn't matter that much. From what I remember, Skull & Bones was Ubi's attempt at making a World of Warships-like game and chasing that goose, not even remotely close to what SoT is, but that didn't stop anyone. TBF, I never thought SoT would make it either. Shows what I know.

Ironically, SoT's success probably motivated original-studio-Ubisoft to chase that trend instead now. It will be as timely as their battle royale I'm sure.
 

ISee

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lol, I have never engaged in any kind of card trading, gem collecting or badge crafting and I'm still able to buy and download my games like ever before. Not a single time was there a pop up encouraging me to participate in any of those activities.

I shouldn’t have to manage an inventory. I shouldn’t have to hide that inventory to prevent weirdos messaging me about fake guns for a game I last played over a decade ago. I shouldn’t have to figure out what to do with digital trading cards

You don't have to do any of this. I never cared enough to even investigate this stuff. The author is a drama searching idiot.
 

fantomena

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Interesting. Maybe the rumors are wrong then, Bloodborne is not coming to PC. :/
Directly contradicts PCGamingInquisition by the way....
Well if Bloodborne PC isn't announced during State of Play that is rumored to happen in august I will lose all hope.

And don't do that eye-emoji react thing to this post. I need more than "Bloodborne PC is happening".
 

inky

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I honestly can't remember a time when PC Gamer wasn't a joke, or gave a shit about PC as a platform. Maybe in the days of print, back when Everquest ruled the world, and Age of Empires up to the first Sims games period of PC Games they really gave a shit. I think most PC-centric publications moved with the advertising dollars when publishers declared PC dead and moved all their efforts and games to the console space, and no one really stuck with what the actual PC platform was doing and the games that were coming out.

To this day we have a lot of "PC" sites that still get surprised about how popular or succesful certain games and genres are. I can definitely say that PC Gamer hit rock bottom when they called Dragon Age 2 the RPG of the decade though. That was what really cemented their bottom tier status.
 

yuraya

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May 4, 2019
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Why would QLOC port Bloodborne?

I would expect FROM to port it and Playstation mobile being the publisher like Horizon. And the same for the enhanced PS5 version.
 

Shahem

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Well if Bloodborne PC isn't announced during State of Play that is rumored to happen in august I will lose all hope.

And don't do that eye-emoji react thing to this post. I need more than "Bloodborne PC is happening".
Time will tell I guess. If there is one Sony game that PC gamers would pay top dollar for it's definitely Bloodborne. I think it would be a waste not to do it but of course alongside a PS5 Remaster.
That's why the initial rumor made so much sense to me. It's easy to see why Sony would be delighted to sell the game again and tap into another market that they know is eager to buy the game.

The video :
 

gabbo

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Dec 22, 2018
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To boil his argument down: The store and sales have meta elements that prevent him from easily finding, buying and playing his games. Steam the application and sales therein, as well as the games themselves have been gamified like the slow drip in an online shooter with the creation of all the search tool and inventory gubbins now thrown at you.

Well he clearly hasn't actually used Steam, as you're not forced to use any of these. Could the client use a new layout, sure, but does it currently stop you from launching the app into library and going straight to your list games- ignoring everything else? No it doesn't. If you know the game you want to buy, search is right there on the front page of the store. If you don't, the search features are quite robust, again ignoring any and all of the inventory or friends or market.

We all share a hobby created by a gross industry
 

Ascheroth

Chilling in the Megastructure
Nov 12, 2018
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I honestly can't remember a time when PC Gamer wasn't a joke, or gave a shit about PC as a platform. Maybe in the days of print, back when Everquest ruled the world, and Age of Empires up to the first Sims games period of PC Games they really gave a shit. I think most PC-centric publications moved with the advertising dollars when publishers declared PC dead and moved all their efforts and games to the console space, and no one really stuck with what the actual PC platform was doing and the games that were coming out.

To this day we have a lot of "PC" sites that still get surprised about how popular or succesful certain games and genres are. I can definitely say that PC Gamer hit rock bottom when they called Dragon Age 2 the RPG of the decade though. That was what really cemented their bottom tier status.
Durante's guest-articles were good though!

Interesting. Maybe the rumors are wrong then, Bloodborne is not coming to PC. :/
Directly contradicts PCGamingInquisition by the way....
Eh, I trust InquisitorAles . Things will be fiiine~
 

Wok

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Oct 30, 2018
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[The] rewards [...] are either complicated financial incentives to push you into spending more money than you otherwise would, or shiny baubles for those who apparently use Steam as a kind of social network for people who miss the days of MySpace pages. Do those people actually exist? They’d better—the entire platform is geared towards them at this point.
It is true. And these people not only exist, but I suspect that they are the biggest spenders on Steam.

No one should have to have a conversation with their mother about how to sell digital trading cards.
You don't have to. If you have access to a non-limited Steam account, use it as another bot in your network to farm cards and sell anime backgrounds.
 
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Tomasety

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[The] rewards [...] are either complicated financial incentives to push you into spending more money than you otherwise would, or shiny baubles for those who apparently use Steam as a kind of social network for people who miss the days of MySpace pages. Do those people actually exist? They’d better—the entire platform is geared towards them at this point.
I haven't read the article and I'm not going to do it. PC Gamer has let me down twice recently so not going to fall for a third.

It is true. And these people not only exist, but I suspect that they are the biggest spenders on Steam.
There's more than just that. There's a huge black market within Steam which only few know/manage well. I mean, when there's people making a living off Steam and its meta economy there's certainly obscure things happening in the background. And I agree with Wok on his suspicious. There are major consumers who not really play games but play "The Steam Game" as an example.
Nevertheless this doesn't mean or prove what the quoted paragraph from above says. The platform is not really geared towards certain minorities whether they are big spenders or not, fortunately.
 
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fokkusu

Burn baby burn🔥🎵
Dec 9, 2018
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Could you remind what (root) sources we have had to confirm Bloodborne?
 

ISee

Oh_no!
Mar 1, 2019
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Let's go back to running executable files directly and manually downloading patches why don't we?
I get the joke, and this might be an unpopular opinion:
But I'd do that if it meant I would not have to deal with DRM, strange anti cheat software that is running with level zero privileges and cosmetic micro transactions.
Where I draw the line is boot discs, config.sys and autoexec.bat configuration, manual IRQ handling, expanded, extended memory and all the other "fun" stuff.
 

NarohDethan

There was a fish in the percolator!
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I get the joke, and this might be an unpopular opinion:
But I'd do that if it meant I would not have to deal with DRM, strange anti cheat software that is running with level zero privileges and cosmetic micro transactions.
Where I draw the line is boot discs, config.sys and autoexec.bat configuration, manual IRQ handling, expanded, extended memory and all the other "fun" stuff.
Those would exist anyway on top of having to fuck with finding your way around the game.
 
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Ex-User (119)

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the lance guy is simply just a modder who did the shoddy 60fps bloodborne thing recently and completey went into extreme fanboy when the pc rumors started.

i cant go into full details but yea bloodborne on pc is certainly happening, there was some tests conducted a few months ago and qloc is the dev/with another partner, if all things do go well we should start seeing/hearing some announcements sony side about some other pc projects soonish

you can have contacts at a dev but a department like qloc they are always working on multiple port projects at once.
 

ISee

Oh_no!
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Those would exist anyway on top of having to fuck with finding your way around the game.
And they would have DRM on top of DRM. All PC gamers are pirates after all.



I checked out his twitter account after Queen's comment and there could be some salt involved. Judge for yourselves.

 
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InquisitorAles

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www.youtube.com

Interesting. Maybe the rumors are wrong then, Bloodborne is not coming to PC. :/
Directly contradicts PCGamingInquisition by the way....
Sigh, not this shit again.... I'm sorry, but Lance McDonald has no proven track-record either, he's just a modder and youtuber who's a big fan of Souls series, so his "I can confirm" statements are as good as mine. And when I asked him what exactly made him so confident about this and can he share more details, he simply ignored me:

I've sad it many times before, I fully trust my sources and they have never failed me before when it comes to info about unannounced projects. And as it was said here already, everyone is free to choose what you want to believe. It's still coming, it's still being actively tested, no solid dates yet, and that's all that I can share for now. Once I'll have more I'll share it as soon as possible.
 

PC-tan

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who the hell is this randommcdonald guy anyway ? When people suddenly believe him more than all the known and trustable insaders that hinted at this ?
He is a modder for the game. And I believe he looks at the files of that game and some other stuff. That being said I doubt he is the type of person that would have contact with people at QLOC.

This is based off me just assuming that he is a modder, I don't imagine that either From or SIE would be in contact with him over stuff about the game. Unless the game is updated or something I doubt that he would have access to files that prove otherwise.


A possibility is that he is a salty fan boy. Since we have seen some people that went crazy when HZD was announced for PC.

I'm not sure how active the Bloodborne mod community would be, but I would imagine that he would be ousted by other in the PC modding community sort of a thing. I'm sure that modding on PS4 has a decent population but I would imagine that there are more people active on PC type of thing.
 

fantomena

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Sigh, not this shit again.... I'm sorry, but Lance McDonald has no proven track-record either, he's just a modder and youtuber who's a big fan of Souls series, so his "I can confirm" statements are as good as mine. And when I asked him what exactly made him so confident about this and can he share more details, he simply ignored me:

I've sad it many times before, I fully trust my sources and they have never failed me before when it comes to info about unannounced projects. And as it was said here already, everyone is free to choose what you want to believe. It's still coming, it's still being actively tested, no solid dates yet, and that's all that I can share for now. Once I'll have more I'll share it as soon as possible.
Well at least you managed to bring my hope back to a stable position. :)
 

Shahem

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the lance guy is simply just a modder who did the shoddy 60fps bloodborne thing recently and completey went into extreme fanboy when the pc rumors started.

i cant go into full details but yea bloodborne on pc is certainly happening, there was some tests conducted a few months ago and qloc is the dev/with another partner, if all things do go well we should start seeing/hearing some announcements sony side about some other pc projects soonish

you can have contacts at a dev but a department like qloc they are always working on multiple port projects at once.
Some other PC projects huh. I wonder what Sony have planned on the PC side. Days Gone ? The Last Guardian ? Spider-Man ?

Hopefully announcements take place this year.
 
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Madventure

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Wow I have this game too.
Checking the Steam Page it say

[UWSL][UWSL]Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?[/UWSL][/UWSL]
“The final version of the game will be available in May 2016.”

Well at least he is still updating the game?


First screenshot, found the moon.
Already beat the game saved you some $$$
 
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Mor

Me llamo Willy y no hice la mili, pero vendo Chili
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I know most of you just care right now about BB and so but, tomorrow is DS and I'm quite excited and we are (potentially) 9 days away from Tetris Effect on Steam, yes, I'm doing the countdown cause' it's the project that excites me the most alongside Control CE, so yeah :cat-heart-blob::cat-heart-blob::cat-heart-blob:
 
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