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
Steam News Hub 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
Steam Search 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
share your ideas for potential experiments you’d like to see from us.
