99.9% of all games are useless to an individual, whem steam can get 10% correct, when you do close to no cooperation, this is an achievement.
Comment on The Knightling Did Everything Right - It Still Struggled to Sell | Beyond the Pixels Podcast
mohab@piefed.social 1 week ago
One reason could be that Steam sucks ass at recommending games and I have no idea how they still have not figured it out.
Since the sale started, half my homepage is games I ALREADY OWN or are already on my wishlist. It also keeps recommending me games from publishers I blocked. At any given point, 80~90% of my homepage is useless.
It’s almost as if there’s some kind of hidden setting stopping small games from showing up in my recommendations. If I don’t actively browse tags I’m interested or pay attention to communities outside of Steam, I miss out on a lot.
PapstJL4U@lemmy.world [bot] 6 days ago
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 week ago
They have an incentive to put games in front of you that they think they’ll like, so I figure it really just is tough. Their hit rate isn’t so bad for me, and what I hear about console storefronts is that the recommendations are even worse. Regardless of platform, relying on a recommendation engine to get word out about your game strikes me as a bad idea. But speaking for myself, I played 18 games that came out this year and easily left at least that many others behind just because there isn’t enough time to play through them all.
Peffse@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I swear 95% of the stuff Steam recommended is reasoned with because it is popular and not because it’s something I would play.
Even when they say it’s related to a library item, it’s not even tangential. Like… Escape the Backrooms is not like Terraria. In any sense. They put that there because Youtubers are selling it.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 6 days ago
If it’s anything at all like the recommendation algorithm that Netflix popularized, it’s that they have tags in common (maybe even as simple as “online multiplayer” if they set a threshold on some value too low) and that people who played one had a decent enough overlap with people who played the other.
chameleon@fedia.io 6 days ago
I get the impression that "online coop" is a tag it weighs very, very heavily, along with most of the "open world survival craft" subtags. Terraria, Factorio and some other games you can put 1000 hours into while optionally playing with a friend are absolute poison for the algorithm, they share a lot of tags with stuff like Rust and V Rising even though they're not remotely the same game.
mohab@piefed.social 6 days ago
Impressive, what’s the genre breakdown on the 18 games you played?
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 6 days ago
It’s probably easier if I just list the titles. I’ve already got them ranked. I enjoyed all of these games, and none of them were stinkers.
mohab@piefed.social 6 days ago
Nice. RPGs in particular seem to be having a good time recently. Lots of well-received games in the previous 2~3 years.