It’s been a whole year since Steam Labs officially launched a series of experimental projects to improve the Steam experience.
Steam Labs has been a great space for Steam to try out new and improved features to make Steam better for everyone. With Labs able to include Steam users in the development process much earlier, it has meant that development has been a lot quicker.
In a recent blog, Steam announced some upcoming projects and took some time to celebrate a great first year of Steam Labs.
“We’ve been listening to your feedback, gathering evidence to learn how people use our experiments, and conducting A/B tests to measure relative success among potential designs.”
What Steam Labs Has Produced in the Past Year
Steam Labs originally launched last July with three experiments and big ambitions for the future of development. Since launching, Steam Labs has introduced the following features to Steam.
Community Recommendations
Community Recommendations is a feature which showcases player reviews on the home page. This feature “brings community energy to the store, enabling users to keep abreast of the titles players are currently enjoying, and why”.
Interactive Recommendations
Steam’s intuitive Interactive Recommender began as an experiment into machine learning. This feature trains itself to recognize game play patterns across millions of Steam users. This enables Steam to generate personalized recommendations for players.
Customer feedback led Steam Labs to let players eliminate a game from influencing recommendation results or to block games you already own on another platform. You can also save your preferences for the next time you look for a new game on Steam.
Play Next
While fine-tuning experiments with machine learning, Labs decided to build Play Next. This feature uses the same tech as above but suggests games you already own – but haven’t yet played. We’re probably all guilty of having a massive backlog of games picked up from bundles that we haven’t got around to playing. This feature helps to jog your memory on some of these great titles.
Search Tools
Another project from Steam Labs was an upgrade to the search tools. New tools requested from users were added including ways to filter results by price, show only games on sale and also exclude games you already own.
Experiments Currently In-Progress
Steam Labs say they are working on a number of different features at the moment. The following are expected to make their way onto Steam in the future.
News & Events Hub
Steam Labs is working on a way for players to explore a personalized feed of gaming news, live-streams and updates about the games they like to play or have on their wish list. This feed can be customized to include or exclude various types of news to help people keep on top of in-game events and other updates.
Query Expansion
Work is ongoing behind the scenes for things like tags and metadata. This is to improve the Steam Search which should help to provide accurate and consistent results. Steam Labs will be using a custom thesaurus for this.
Micro Trailers
Steam Labs is working on a way to include video snapshots of games in the Store. This is based on the idea that most people take a short time to scroll through a game page to learn more. These micro trailers offer bite-sized content to help players learn as much about a game in as little time as possible.
You can already see Micro Trailers making an appearance on the Steam Store. You can find them by hovering on items on the home page, in sales events and through the Interactive Recommender. At the moment, Steam Labs is still tinkering with this feature and will expand its use throughout Steam.
It looks like Steam Labs has a solid future of updates and brand new features planned. It’ll be interesting to see what else Steam Labs can come up with in the future. We’ll be keeping an eye out for all the new Steam features and will let you know when we see them!