Steam Labs | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net KitGuru.net - Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards Fri, 14 Feb 2020 20:20:03 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://www.kitguru.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/cropped-KITGURU-Light-Background-SQUARE2-32x32.png Steam Labs | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net 32 32 Valve’s latest Steam Labs experiments aim to help you tackle that backlog https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/valves-latest-steam-labs-experiments-aim-to-help-you-tackle-that-backlog/ https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/valves-latest-steam-labs-experiments-aim-to-help-you-tackle-that-backlog/#respond Fri, 14 Feb 2020 19:00:52 +0000 https://www.kitguru.net/?p=452037 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 …

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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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Valve updates Steam Labs with deep dive, community reviews and recommendation experiments https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/valve-updates-steam-labs-with-deep-dive-community-reviews-and-recommendation-experiments/ https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/valve-updates-steam-labs-with-deep-dive-community-reviews-and-recommendation-experiments/#respond Fri, 20 Sep 2019 16:58:59 +0000 https://www.kitguru.net/?p=426612 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. Now, Steam Labs is live and gives Steam users the chance to try out experimental new features and provide feedback before these experiments are rotated out with new ones. Steam …

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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. Now, Steam Labs is live and gives Steam users the chance to try out experimental new features and provide feedback before these experiments are rotated out with new ones.

Steam Labs experiments started off with ‘micro trailers' an interactive recommendation system and an automatically generated half-hour daily show used to advertise popular and trending games on Steam. Micro Trailers and the Steam daily show have since been rotated out with new experiments, while the interactive recommendation system has received an update.

The first new Steam Labs experiment is called ‘Deep Dive', which is another new recommendation system that uses Steam APIs to deliver recommendations in a more detailed view, showing off screenshots, release date/developer information and adding buttons for adding to a wishlist or visiting the store page.

The next experiment is ‘Community Reviews', which will display the most helpful reviews for the most user-recommended games on Steam. The interesting part here is that it is entirely community driven, so games that are commonly being recommended will get a viewership boost.

The final experiment is an update to the interactive recommender. This feature is now being prominently placed on the Steam Store home page to prove its worth. The feature still uses Valve's machine learning tech to craft a recommendation list based on games you are interested in and you can sort these titles based on whether you are looking for something newer or older, or popular versus niche.

The Steam Labs community forum can be used to provide feedback on features, so if you give them a go, you can detail issues, improvements needed or offer praise over there.

KitGuru Says: A lot of the experiments right now are based around the idea of recommending new games to users in different ways, so there isn't a ton of variety. Still, it is interesting to see what the Steam developers are actively working on and trying out.

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Valve launches ‘Steam Labs’ to openly share experimental features with Steam users https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/valve-launches-steam-labs-to-openly-share-experimental-features-with-steam-users/ https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/valve-launches-steam-labs-to-openly-share-experimental-features-with-steam-users/#respond Fri, 12 Jul 2019 13:12:39 +0000 https://www.kitguru.net/?p=417910 micro-trailers, an automatically generated daily games show and a new recommendation system are amongst the first experiments.

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Valve appears to be taking a new, more open approach to development across the board at the moment. We are starting to see the fruits of these experiments on the game development side with Dota Underlords and now, the development team behind the Steam platform is adopting similar ‘early access' ideas, giving users access to experimental features in order to gather feedback.

This new effort is known as ‘Steam Labs' and you should see it on the front page of the Steam Store right now. You don't need to opt in to the Steam beta client to access these features, instead you can just head over to the Steam Labs page and see what the latest experimental features are and try them out. Valve notes that these features are “works in progress” and while some of them may turn great, others may also be tossed out.

Steam Labs is launching with three experimental features to be tried out. The first is ‘micro trailers', which replaces game icons with six second trailers so you can see some footage of a game running before deciding to click on the store page. This is similar to what video sites do, where you can hover the mouse over a thumbnail to preview the content.

The second experiment is an interactive recommendation system. Using machine learning, this system analyses your play time in your top 50 games on Steam and makes recommendations for what to play next. You get to adjust the parameters too, limiting it to games released more recently, you can also adjust sliders for niche versus popularity.

The third experiment is for an automatic show, which is essentially an automatically generated version of a Nintendo Direct for Steam and with no voice over. The daily, half-hour showcase will pick new and trending games from Steam and play them back to back using Direct-style trailers, which could be an interesting way of discovering games you've not come across before on Steam. Although without any real life presenters, the show lacks personality.

KitGuru Says: Each of these ideas are very interesting and hopefully with a wider test-base and more feedback, Valve will be able to improve these features further before fully rolling them out. Hopefully this step towards more open development is a sign of more good things to come at Valve. 

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