Image: Valve

Part of the reason we started Steam Hype was that Steam's algorithms had, until very recently, completely failed to connect people with games they would genuinely be interested in. We still firmly believe that human curation (the kind that only comes from decades of gaming insight) is the best way to do things, but it's impossible to deny that Valve has made some significant improvements recently, especially with the rollout of the weekly calendar view on the store's front page. In a statement yesterday, Valve announced their plans to double down, applying those improvements to the Discounts & Events section of the store.

While it's easy to be cynical about Valve trying to solve a very human problem with algorithms again (the company is notorious for avoiding hiring staff to do a job when they can approximate a solution with math), the calendar view has been a resounding success. Talking with others, it's finally showing people games that interest them, while managing to filter out most of the noise.

I've even spotted a few games via it that I might otherwise have missed. Indie developers have already been seeing significant improvements, too, with the team behind hybrid mech action/strategy game Drop Command (featured here on Monday!) claiming that the calendar view brought them many thousands of new wishlists in the run-up to release.

Valve doesn't want to set a date for when the store changes will be rolling out, but they estimate that under the new layout and algorithm they've got worked out, they'll be able to show ten times as many games to customers in a given day, and have them better tuned to the individual, looking better at what games they've bought and spent time with on their accounts.

While not directly related, they also announced that developers should get a new set of back-end tools to help them manage discounts and sales events in the future. With that said, they end their statement with what I can only read as a further abdication of duty: "Our goal is to let developers focus on crafting the most compelling games and deals for customers, and not spend time trying to convince someone at Valve to feature their products."

Again, not a terrible idea on paper, but it sounds like these moves could put one more barrier of automated silence between developers and Valve. Considering the difficulties some developers have had getting in touch with a single human staff member when Valve's automated or obfuscated systems have failed, it would be nice to see them commit to dealing more with developers rather than less.