Back in July, following the success of Valve’s open approach to Dota Underworlds development, the Steam team also began trialling a similar early access system for new experimental features. Steam Labs is live and has had a few updates since launch. This week, the latest batch of experimental features were added for users to test out, including one that recommends the next game you should play. 

Due to all of the Steam sales that have happened over the years, many of us have built up hefty backlogs of games on the platform. Valve is now testing out a ‘Play Next' feature that will help you tackle that backlog by recommending unplayed games from your library.

Another experiment is Community Recommendations, a new discoverability feature on Steam that will show games based on recent review scores from other Steam users. Meanwhile, Deep Dive lets you choose a game you are interested in or have enjoyed and find other titles on Steam with similarities.

Other experiments are carried over from the early days of Steam Labs, including more powerful search tools, an automatically generated daily show advertising top games on Steam, an interactive recommendation system for discovering new games and microtrailers, a YouTube style video preview function for briefly glancing at footage for games on the store before clicking through to the full page.

You can find all of the Steam Labs experiments and test them out, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Steam Labs is a great idea in my opinion, it is particularly interesting to see Valve's different ideas for boosting engagement and game discovery on Steam. What do you all think of the current batch of experimental Steam features? Is there anything you would like to see fully implemented? 

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