So with all the discussion about Steam needing curation, too much games being released, there's only trash in Steam and what not I decided to look through my Discovery Queue and see what games it could appear there as recommendations. This post are just my overall impressions about the way the system works, some numbers and curiosities.
In Valve's own words the Discovery Queue is
"a mix of products that are new, top-selling, and similar to what you play and use on Steam."
I went through 127 games and put them into a spreadsheet. So first let's have a look in the genre breakdown:
Almost 12% of games that appeared in my Queue were from the
Horror genre, followed by
Simulation and
Survival. Keep in mind that genre classification is a mess as some games can have more than one genre, so I decided to choose what seemed to be the main one for each game. Those genres being recommended weren't a surprise at all, as according to
SteamDB there was
3230 with the tag
Simulation,
1626 with the tag
Horror and
1258 with the tag
Survival.
Being honest I was expecting more entries in Platformer, RPG and Metroidvania. The number of Bullet Heaven (Vampire Survivor-likes) games kind of surprised me as I wasn't expecting any to show up since I haven't played any entry in the genre lately, and there isn't that tag for that kind of games so I put it manually.
Mostly of the DLC that appeared to me were positive, the only exception being Forza Horizon 5 Fast X Car Pack (
Mostly negative) and Crusader Kings III: Legacy of Persia (
Mixed).
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Looking through the year of the recommended games, the vast majority (80%) where from 2023, the column labeled as N/A were games with no release date, they just had a Coming Soon as release date. Q4 2023 games represented around 56% of the suggestions so it seems like these were the busier months regarding releases in 2023!
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One stat that I payed attention while navigation through my queue was the number of user reviews
. Years ago people were estimating the number of copies sold using the amount of user reviews, though I'm not sure if it was a reliable number, but while I'll not be trying to estimate what those games sold it's interesting to see they are getting a lot of reviews or not.
For the graph I only took in consideration games that were released
As one can see, mostly of the games aren't get a lot of reviews. From the ones that were recommended for me only two managed to get more than 10k reviews, they were
Gorilla Tag and
STALCRAFT. Meanwhile 2 games didn't even manage to get more than 10 reviews. With the amount of games being released it's kinda of expected, nowadays you can't expect to release a mid game and have success, as even good games may not have success.
That's it, thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.