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Steam Labs
- viraptor 7y agoI love the recommender experiment with a "popular-niche" slider. I want this slider almost everywhere when not searching for a very specific thing I'm already aware of. It was a great feature in last.fm, and I miss it in other streaming platforms. This is especially useful in something like steam, where you get the front page full of suggestions... that you've likely already seen many times, or heard about because everybody played them. I can't find anything interesting on the normal recommendations, but after going 100% niche I've added 3 games (from 2014-2016) to my wishlist.
- throwaway2048 7y agoAgreed, cant even count the amount of times I have searched for $VERY_SPECIFIC_THING on Google, but got 10 pages of completely irrelevant references to something that has close to matching keywords and is way more popular.
- Razengan 7y agoThere has been a very noticeable decline in Google Search result quality over the last 3 or so years. It seems pointless to try complete proper sentences anymore. Even specific queries about X often shows me "TOP 10 X!!!" or similar adcrap.
- solarkraft 7y agoIs this measurable? I have this impression as well, but wonder whether it's purely subjective. Oh maybe the decline of findability of specific things is caused by the increase of total things on the web.
- Razengan 7y agoIt varies. I thought about collecting every instance of bad results along with the IP address region and Private Browsing state etc.
- LoSboccacc 7y agoat some point they removed the "show users link he clicked before" and that makes the start of Google usefulness. you used to get Wikipedia and stack overflow reliably on top in 2014, then by 2015 it stopped, where by Google choice of by content farm Henning better at gaming the system idk, but the key was removing history from result bias
- philtar 7y agoI've never seen that in my autocomplete. Must be based on your previous search results.
- ComputerGuru 7y agoYeah, I wrote about it a few years ago and it was discussed here on HN too, I think: https://neosmart.net/blog/2016/on-the-growing-intentional-uselessness-of-google-search-results/ https://neosmart.net/blog/2016/on-the-growing-intentional-us...
- lechienquipete 7y agoIt's a fantastic tool to discover things! As soon as you start going more to the niche side, it gets super specific. My day jobs is RTL design, doing digital circuits, and my top 1 niche recommendation is MHRD, "a game in which you design various hardware circuits in a hardware description language."
- notafraudster 7y agoMHRD is pretty fun. The implementation is a little janky (it's written in Java, the interface isn't accelerated, the leaderboards are a little broken), but as a game it's basically "starting with a NAND gate, build a processor from scratch, using components you've built in earlier levels". Honestly, for me, it was like a refresher of the 6 month processor design course I did in my CS degree 20 years ago. You might find it a little simplistic given your day job, but for anyone else reading, I found it really fun. Side note: If you like MHRD and want something a little less real world and a little more video gamey, try TIS-100, which might be the single best game on Steam.
- ldoughty 7y agostill cant separate out co-op story from co-op because of multiplayer :-/ Why is it so hard to find story co-op games... always MMORPGs, RTSs, or sandbox games. Battleblock theater and pit people were fantastic co-op games.. and stuff like Halo's co-op campaign was great :-/
- phalangion 7y agoLovers in a dangerous spacetime, Magicka, Rampage Knights, Borderlands, Monaco. Those are a few I have enjoyed.
- phalangion 7y agoAlso, Divinity Original Sin 2, Towerfall Ascension, Giana Sisters, XCOM, Sniper Elite (enjoyed single player, and it has a coop mode that I've never tried).
- neuronexmachina 7y agoSome more story co-op games to add: Guacamelee (co-op metroidvania), any of the Lego games, Trine
- totoglazer 7y agoMajorly agree. Overcooked 2 is our current fave. Also Diablo 3 is a classic.
- StavrosK 7y agoI'm also loving Overcooked but it's not a story coop, just coop.
- pointsphere 7y agoYeah those are hard to find. One of my favorite games is “Nuclear Throne Together”, although it is quite hard, and more players make it much harder. A current good and accessible one is “Vectronom”, a very stylized rhythm game where you play as cubes moving through levels morphing to electronic beats. Mainstream games Rayman and Overcooked are also very good and fun and instantly accessible even to “non-gamers”. Another one I discovered which is quite fun is “Hidden In Plain Sight”, where all players look like NPCs and most modes revolve around figuring out who is a player and who is CPU. It can be really intense because of the psychological terror. “Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime” is fun but gets tedious because of the huge levels. Most of those those don’t have mich of a story though, except maybe Rayman. But that doesn’t detract from the games being fun.
- renjimen 7y agoGreat that they're experimenting with content discovery mechanisms. Unfortuntely, with these micro trailers they seem to be going the same route as Netflix: enticing people with flashiness alone. I think most people will go to the reviews section or an aggregator website like Metacritic before they purchase a game. Why not include that information up front along side the flashy visuals? Surely that would reward talented developers while giving users the best possible experience.
- stuffbyspencer 7y agoI like the idea of having metacritic and more review-oriented info upfront near games. There's currently a few browser extensions that solve these issues. Valve would benefit from reaching out to these developers and implementing some of these features directly into the storefront. [ although, I get that it's a balance of keeping it feature-full + lightweight ]
- Nullabillity 7y agoSteam at least used to include the metacritic score on the storefront page (though never as prominently as their own tomatoes-esque system).
- renjimen 7y agoYeah, Steam does a good job at the moment of including user and professional reviews on the game pages. The fact they let you sort and filter game searches by average review is great. Also, the tools to track changes in reviews over time is really useful to see how early access games are changing during development. Here's hoping for more in the same vein!
- worldsayshi 7y agoI don't get why steam doesn't implement GameSpy like features. That is, a common lobby that list (and allow you to join) public multiplayer sessions for all steam games that you own. It would make it possible to revive quite a few of those "dead" niche multiplayer games. And greatly engage the steam users around the steam games.
- TulliusCicero 7y agoProbably difficult to get developers for "dead" games to bother integrating with the API.
- lozenge 7y agoA lot of games are passionate creations and the creators would happily put a few hours in to report info to Steam servers if they thought it would double multiplayer use for another year or so at the end of a game's life. It's the franchises which consider games dead after dropping the sequel, ie Call of Duty, FIFA etc. They want people to buy the next version every year regardless of whether the game is actually better enough to justify the cost.
- paavohtl 7y agoSteam does have that - kind of. There's a "servers" window, which you can open from the View menu. It lists multiplayer servers for lots of different games - mostly Source engine games like CS:GO and Team Fortress 2, but also games with Steam matchmaking like ARMA2/3.
- Razengan 7y agoIt's bizarre that the digital stores of multi-billion dollar corporations still can't seem able to get discovery down perfectly. Steam seems better off than the rest, and I can't comment on Google Play or Xbox Marketplace but on the App Store, Nintendo eShop and PlayStation Store, it's still hard to discover what you're looking for if you don't already know about it. For example, all RPG games like Baldur's Gate, or platformers in a pixel-art style with chiptune music. The best way that I know of for discovering all such games is to search for a name that I already know, and look in the Similar or "Also Bought" list on its product page. Of course even then their algorithms don't list all relevant games and are often swamped with microtransaction-loaded crapware/copycats. YouTube suffers from the same sickness, and Google Search itself has been dumbed down over the past few years. Is it deliberate? Are they afraid that rivals and "researchers" will get too much information about their business if their search and filter functionality was "too" powerful, or that users might leave sooner after they get exactly what they came for? (I know I can use third-party sites like itch.io to discover games, but this is about the app stores' built-in functionality.)
- mysterydip 7y agoI'm guessing years of A-B testing has led them to believe the currect way maximizes profits.
- z3t4 7y agoMaybe not a coincident that random reward works best for continuous purchase/engagement. For example Youtube video recommendations.
- forrestthewoods 7y agoDiscovery is an unsolved problem. I can’t think of a single media platform that does it well.
- solarkraft 7y agoSpotify?
- wiradikusuma 7y agoSince we're talking about Steam... is there any way to check _in my library_: which ones are RPG, which ones are 3D and visually stunning (I just bought a fancy card and want to test drive)? API is fine.
- fnordsensei 7y agoThe only way I've found to do that is to go through and manually tag the games myself.
- Firerouge 7y agoSorting by recommended system requirements would be pretty cool. Library listings for games could definitely benefit from the addition of genre/category tags. It's annoying having to go to the store page to check what kind of game it is.
- cloogshicer 7y agoThey teased an update for the Steam library recently, I think better filtering functionality is part of it. Not sure when it's coming out though, but since it's Valve time, you never know anyways.
- cyunem 7y agoTo avoid the hassle of categorising games manually, I've been using https://github.com/Depressurizer/Depressurizer https://github.com/Depressurizer/Depressurizer It took me a couple of tries to get a functioning setup with an older version, but it's working now and they seem to have improved the UI a bit. It allows automatically making categories in your library based on genres and user-defined tags from steam as well as some other things like ratings and time to beat
- vultour 7y agoI've recently turned my really old web-based PHP version into a cli: https://github.com/Vultour/steamcli https://github.com/Vultour/steamcli It's pretty rough, but lets you filter your games based on the user tags on each game. You can also filter games between multiple accounts at the same time, which was the main feature of the original version.
- stuffbyspencer 7y ago> We're always trying new things with Steam, but often only share them with the world when they're ready to be made a part of the platform. Steam Labs allows us to share these ideas earlier ...Steam has just entered the fabled early access phase :O lol, for real this seem neat. In regards to the current 3 experiments: MICRO-TRAILERS] this is a cool idea, I like when YouTube implemented a similar concept. My only hesitation with this, though, is it appears to just grab from a random point in the game trailer. The thing I don't like about some of the game's trailers I visit is it takes so long to show any real gameplay or, worse of all, shows no gameplay at all. A novel, yet to be fair tough to manage, alternative would be to allow users to submit recorded gameplay clips, and have the community vote on the best "representative" clips, and show those instead. My personally favorite is the 2x2 grid for curators. INTERACTIVE RECOMMENDER] this is dope. I love this. It probably won't become my default way to discover, but I can easily see myself using this either once a week, or whenever I feel like spending some money. As a Linux user, I'd like the ability to filter by OS, but otherwise this is, again, dope. AUTOMATIC SHOW] I like the base concept, but I can't see myself sitting through 30 minutes of its current iteration. The mockup video with the voiceover definitely is more appealing to me, I'm excited to see with how they progress with robotic voice over. Honestly, even if the robo-voice sounds stilted and odd, I think that could add to the charm. Don't try to act like a real human is behind the videos, embrace the concept of a robot tirelessly producing these daily [ or weekly / whatever ] videos. Sorta like a Toonami vibe. Tom was awesome! Also, it'd be nice to split the videos into separate entities. One video for overall games, one video showcasing strategy, etc. Having to skip around in a 30 minute video to find the parts I care about is needless. Either split them up & let me choose, or develop an easy-to-use playback controller that lets me auto-skip to the parts that I'd be interested in. Like scene-selection on DVDs.
- jccalhoun 7y agoThe recommendations is pretty good but it is limited because a lot of the games it recommended me were games that I had bought through GOG, Epic, or other places. If it could pick up that I have a game on other stores it would be more useful.
- Faark 7y agoYeah, maybe a third of them did I play elsewhere. But I consider this a signal on how good the commender already is. Don't think there is a good way for steam to pick that up automatically without it being a privacy nightmare. An "I played that" button would be nice, help steam improve/validate recommendations and might even be used to advertise new content / sequels / etc.
- getlawgdon 7y agoI like this a lot. What are some other sandboxes like this?