The Steam Discovery Update, which released back in September 2014, has been a great success according to Valve. The update improved the user experience in finding more games they like to play through personalized recommendations.
In an update for the program posted in the SteamworksDev group that was later reposted on Reddit, Valve said Discovery Queue, the system that displays the recommendations based on each user’s taste in games, directly led to a significant increase in sales and views on each game’s store page.
“The Steam Discovery Update as a whole resulted in a sustained 30 percent increase in views of product pages across Steam, and the discovery queue has contributed almost 75 percent of that total increase in page views,” said Valve.
“In addition to the raw increases in traffic, we’ve also carefully monitored sales data to make sure we’re growing the size of the pie, rather than just adjusting the size of the slices,” Valve said. “Steam’s overall growth doesn’t just come from the biggest hits (which continue to see great success), but also from the smaller titles that are now better able to reach the audience that is right for them.”
Steam Curators did not perform as well as Valve had hoped for however, as “the day to day interactions are not as high as we’d like, and we know we need to make some changes to better expose curators,” Valve said.
“We think the general notion of editorialized and community-curated content has a lot of potential to help users discover new content and make better informed decisions, but we still have work to do to make better use of information generated by curators.”