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Shipped: Personalized Shopping With New Tag, Genre, and Category Pages

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 17:10:49 +0000

Today's Steam update fully releases two Steam Labs Experiments! Experiment 013 New Store Hubs Design and 012 Exploring Sales have reached completion and graduated from mere experiments into full Steam store features with your feedback and help.

Store Hubs

This update brings big updates to the various tag, genre, category, and theme browsing pages across the Steam store. These new store hubs have been tested and iterated upon with player feedback since launching as an experiment in November, 2021.

Exploring Sales (AKA Faceted Browsing)

One of the most powerful new features of the store hubs is the set of filters and sorting options provided by the 'faceted browsing' section of each page. Originally released as a Steam Labs experiment in December of 2020, these tools have become an important way to deeply explore the entire Steam catalog on the new store hubs.

Read the full Steam Blog post

Experiment 14: Discovery Queue Update

Mon, 11 Jul 2022 19:39:14 +0000

Today's new Steam Labs experiment launches an updated format for the Steam Discovery Queue, creating a more focused experience that makes it easier to explore the games that Steam recommends for you.

You can give the new queue experience a try right here, or you can always find it on the Steam Labs page.

[salesection=35510][/salesection]

What is the Steam Discovery Queue?

Originally launched in 2014, the Steam Discovery Queue gives players a way to step through a personalized set of recommended games one at a time. To date, 115 million players have used the Steam Discovery Queue, viewing a combined total of 18 billion game store pages.

What is new about this experiment?

Today's update makes it easier to see key details about each game, and to flip through a queue of games faster than before.

Here are the highlights from this update:

Launch into the queue without leaving the page you are on
Simplified presentation of key details about each game to give you a taste of what that game is about
See why each game is being recommended specifically to you; maybe it's because you have friends who play it, or it's similar to other games you play, for example
Add a game to your wishlist with the click of a button or view the game's full store page for a more in-depth view
Ignore games that just aren't your jam. We'll make sure to hide them in the future.

This update brings a whole new presentation to the discovery queue, but we're not done yet. We're launching it in Steam Labs because we'd like your feedback to help shape this new format and the features it includes.

A couple of things still under way that we plan to roll out in the future:

Coming soon... new queue display on the Steam homepage
Coming soon... launch the new queue from any store page
Coming soon... optimized for all screen sizes from desktop to mobile to tablet
Coming soon... full support for gamepad UI on Steam Deck

Why now?

We've been working on updating various areas of Steam to work better across a growing range of devices including desktop, mobile, tablets, and now Steam Deck. For the Discovery Queue, we found that we needed a new approach to how it works so that it can be more easily navigated on a variety of devices and to make for a better experience overall.

About Steam Labs

Every year, we create new experiments around discoverability, video, machine learning, and more. You know who we thought might enjoy seeing them? Everyone.

With Steam Labs experiments, you can try, share, and break potential new features, while we figure out what to keep and what to scrap. Share your feedback with the developers and designers working on these features and help shape the future of Steam.

Check out all experiments on the Steam Labs page or drop us some feedback in the Steam Labs discussion boards

Experiment 13: Main Carousel Update

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 21:38:06 +0000

Thank you to everyone who's tested and shared feedback with us regarding Experiment 13.

Keep the feedback coming!

Experiment 13 Updates

Simplified the animations in the main carousel area
Added a switch to disable trailers which otherwise autoplay in this area
Set discounted items to be prioritized among items in the ON YOUR WISHLIST section
Updated all store hubs for consistency and introduced more relevant tabs and sections throughout

Experiment 13: Store Hubs Updates

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 19:46:38 +0000

Thank you to everyone who's tested and shared feedback with us regarding Experiment 13. While we're not able to respond to every post you've shared in the discussion forums, we do read them all, and are planning additional changes based on your reactions and ideas.

In the meantime, we'd like to share a summary of changes we've already made based on the comments in your posts. Thanks again for testing, and keep the feedback coming!

Experiment 13 Updates

Simplified the area above the item browser list view
Moved events and coming soon titles below the item browser list view
Updated the SPECIALS section with better logic for determining what titles to display, now called the CURRENT SPECIALS section. This section takes popularity of discounts into account, while the previous version merely displayed the deepest discounts.
Improved tag browsing: Refined the item browser by merging all of the subgenres into one list for easier exploration, plus moving a few features and themes around
Fixed the main carousel to filter out items based on store search preferences (hide ignored items, content types, etc.)
Various bug fixes

Steam Labs Experiment 13: Store Hubs

Fri, 17 Dec 2021 18:46:20 +0000

With Steam Labs Experiment 10 last December, we introduced dozens of new genres, categories, and tags to our store’s navigation. Today we're launching Experiment 13, where we’ve revamped these destinations, or store hubs, with powerful new tools for browsing, filtering, and exploring deeper into each category.

When you join the experiment from the Steam Labs page, you will find that every category and tag page on the store has been updated, introducing these new layouts and features to hundreds of niche destinations throughout. You'll encounter these pages by exploring the "Categories" drop-down in the store menu, or by clicking on tags from a game's store page.

Including new ways to browse every niche of Steam

Rich Recommendations Carousel

The most notable feature of the new hubs is the carousel of featured games right at the top of the page. Much like our previous design, this area features new, top-selling, and discounted titles through the lens of our recommendations system which takes into account the games you’ve played, your friends' recommendations, and the curators and developers you follow. The new carousel features more metadata about each game, including tags, release date, and review score, plus a large presentation of the game’s micro trailer, a feature which you may remember from Steam Labs Experiment 1.

Recent & Upcoming Events

Keep up to date on the latest news, updates, and events happening in games across Steam, niche by niche. Within each hub, you'll find a section featuring in-game events, recent updates, and news posts from the developers of games you play, those you wish for, or those which are recommended for you.

More Personalized Recommendations

Our tag-driven recommendations are also listed for you on the new hubs, making it easy to discover titles tagged similarly to the games you've been enjoying.

Items from Your Wishlist

Relevant items you've added to your Wishlist are now conveniently displayed on every Store Hub..

Powerful Sorts & Filters

Our new content hub design features powerful new filtering tools which we first introduced with Steam Labs Experiment 12. This new section allows you to sort by new and trending, top selling, top rated, or discount amount. And you can filter by features, tags, or your own shopping preferences like language support or whether to hide some of the games you've already discovered.

Try it out, then let us know what you think!

To join this experiment and try the new Store Hubs, just visit the Steam Labs page and click on "Join The Store Hubs Experiment" for Experiment 13. It will redirect you to one of the updated hubs so you can start exploring right away.

Join the Experiment

Once you've joined the experiment, you can find just the thing you're looking for, such as upcoming co-op survival games, the new and trending atmospheric, story-rich, open world games, the top-rated roguelike space games, current deals on third-person, single player action games, or whatever your thing might be.

You can also check out an example of the themes these new hubs enable. Our Space Hub demonstrates this theming in action.

Have a feature request in the new hubs? Spot a bug? Want to express your thoughts? Join us in the discussion forums. We'd love to hear what you think.

Steam Labs Experiment 12: Exploring Sales

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 20:51:00 +0000

New Ways to Browse During the Holidays

Each holiday sale, Steam features thousands of titles on discount. As part of this year’s Autumn Sale we introduced over a dozen genre- and theme-specific sale pages to help players browse and discover our most popular games on discount during the event. We found these themed pages drove more game store page visits during the sale than all but one other Steam store point of discovery – the grid of featured games at the top of the home page.

Given the popularity of these themed pages, we’ve introduced more of them in this year’s Winter Sale, and we’ve added some smarts so we’re able to now list them based on their likely relevance to you:

Genres, Themes, Features, & More

Once you arrive at one of these pages during the Winter Sale, such as this one featuring the most popular Winter Sale Co-Op Games, you’ll discover a number of ways to browse the hundreds of games it features. Tabs offer common sub-genres, themes, or other tags shared by the hundreds of games featured on each page. Sections of these pages in some cases also display titles which all share a common theme such as viewpoint, player support, or additional themes. And because there are so many great games to feature on each of these pages, we’ve also introduced faceted browsing.

Faceted Browsing: Searching while Exploring

Faceted browsing lets you tell Steam what you’re looking for as you browse, by quickly filtering titles along a variety of axes such as visual style, theme, mood, player support, and more. Concepts can be selected across categories to serve as quick AND search operations, while concepts can be selected within categories to serve as quick OR search operations. For example, this set of choices on the Winter Sale Casual Games page displays titles which are both colorful AND relaxing:

While this set of choices displays titles featured on the same Winter Sale Casual Games page which are either colorful OR cute:

While these themed pages do not feature *all* Winter sale titles which meet the criteria you select, they feature the most popular matches on discount. (For our most powerful search capabilities, visit Steam Search, where results can be limited to discounted titles, and concepts can even be expressly omitted.)

Give faceted browsing a try when you visit any of our Winter Sale pages featuring Co-Op Games and more.

Let us know what you think of Steam Labs Experiment 12: Exploring Sales, in its first phase of development and now available during the Winter Sale, then keep an eye out for more faceted browsing tools, powerful browsing experiments, and store discovery solutions headed your way in the New Year.

Shipped: Steam News Hub

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 22:37:04 +0000

Whether you're at work, on the bus, or playing at home, you can now browse your personalized Steam News Hub to easily find updates, announcements, and events for the games you play, wishlist, and follow.

The Steam News Hub, a part of Steam Labs since March, has fully released today!

Read the full write-up

https://store.steampowered.com/news/

Steam Labs Experiment 010: Browsing Steam

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 21:03:48 +0000

Introducing New Ways to Browse Steam

With this experiment, we aim to increase the surface area of the store by introducing a broader set of ways to browse Steam’s catalog of games from the outset—no login or complex searching required. Our new views provide greater exposure to the breadth of games available on Steam through new useful points of entry such as sub-genres, themes, and player modes. We hope you’ll opt into our Store Browse Experiment to give these new views a try, then let us know what you think in the discussions.

New & Noteworthy

Many users rely on our charts for quick snapshots of what’s new and popular on Steam. These are now accessible from one menu, New & Noteworthy, which also provides direct access to the biggest events currently running Steam—including game festivals, publisher sales, and other seasonal celebrations.

Categories

A basic list of genres, while easy to browse, falls a bit short given how large our catalog has grown. Our new Categories menu helps users quickly discover and dive into the breadth and depth of interesting games on Steam. This menu serves up dozens of new categories of games, which can then be explored further.

It’s not enough to simply offer good games on Steam—we also need to make sure they’re easy to discover. And to do that, we need to organize them in ways that make sense without being overwhelming. You might be able to fit the same amount of goods in an open-air bazaar as in a cramped warehouse, but you’re far more likely to find what you want in the former.

The first step in building such a system is to present meaningful entry points which reflect the various ways people typically want to browse a store full of games.

New Entry Points: Genres, Themes, and Player Modes

This experiment exposes entry points modeled after the three chief ways players tend to browse Steam—by genre, by theme, and by player modes. Each of these motivations broadly answers a different question:

Genres “What kind of game is this? What is it like to play?”
Strategy, RPG, 3D Platformer, Metroidvania, etc.

Themes “What is the game’s content like?”
Fantasy, Science Fiction, Cute, Relaxing, Anime, Horror, etc.

Player Modes “Who can I play the game with?”
Singleplayer, Multiplayer, MMO, Co-op, etc.

These player motivations can be organized and expressed using our existing tags and metadata. Categories grouped under the Genres and Themes entry points are defined by tags, whereas categories grouped under Player Modes are defined by metadata provided directly by the developer.

We arrived at these three top-level categories through a mix of formal research and intuition. But there’s also strong precedent for this scheme on Steam itself in the form of Steam Curators. We noticed many curators are building lists of specific types of games, almost all of which fall under one of the above three patterns: Gameplay and genre-based lists like City Builders, theme-based lists like Games with Dogs, or player mode-based lists like Games to Play with Your Significant Other.

New Browse Views

Among these three entry points we are currently surfacing 48 genre categories, 8 theme categories, and 7 player mode categories, for a total of 63 new categories. Clicking on any of these will take you to a dedicated content hub, a landing page dedicated to that kind of game.

Each of these destinations has its own URL, so you can bookmark them or share them with friends. Each features a carousel highlighting featured games, top sellers, and specials, as well as five specific tabs listing

New & Trending
Top Sellers
What’s Being Played
Top Rated
Upcoming

Players can narrow by popular tags within these hubs as well. The left column of tags surfaces popular genre and sub-genre tags common to this category, and the right column surfaces other types of popular tags (such as mechanics, visuals, themes, and player modes).

Clicking on any of these will take you to a sub-view of the content hub. In the illustration above, we’re viewing Building & Automation Sims, but now we’re viewing only those which also include the Space Sim tag. Each of these sub-views gets its own unique URLs too.

Viewers can return to the parent category any time by toggling the filtering tag previously clicked, or by clicking another to display a different sub-view of the category.

Steam’s Special Sections

This experiment also moves some items previously found in their own top-level menus (such as Software and Hardware) into Special Sections under Categories. Now these and other potential points of entry are all consolidated in a single categorical browse menu.

Our Design Process

How can we be confident in our selection and definition of over 60 new categories? This is an experiment, and thankfully our process includes you. Your feedback on our decisions will help us refine our categorization. To date, our methodology has been a mixture of traditional Library Science and human intuition backed by numerical analysis, and is built leveraging previous Steam Labs experimentation.

We organized all of our user tags into meaningful Categories such as Genres, Visuals, Themes, and Features. These categories were first used in Deep Dive to help determine similarity between games.
We mapped out the semantic relationships between tags, so Steam could recognize that a Strategy RPG is both a Strategy game and also an RPG. This feature was first used in Query Expansion for Search.
We’ve made some efforts to improve the quality of Steam tags. We built an internal tool that analyzes the quality of the tags of every game on Steam, flagging games that have too few tags, or are missing crucial tags like genres and subgenres, and now surface these and other warnings to developers. We paired this tag quality inspector with a new developer tool, the Tag Wizard, that helps our partners improve the sets of tags associated with their games.
We identified a flexible hierarchy of genres using prior research in games classification, as well as statistical analysis of which tags appear most commonly alongside other tags on Steam.
We built a system for defining tag clusters to reveal higher-level concepts like Card & Board Games rather than a single tag like Card Game. Now, a tag cluster like Card & Board Games isn’t defined as simply Card Game plus Board Game. Instead, it also includes tags like Solitaire, Card Battler, Deckbuilder, Tabletop, and so on. And naturally, it uses Query Expansion to make sure nothing slips through the cracks.
We gave each tag cluster its own permanent landing page as described above.
We built a tool that analyzes which games fall into which categories, across the entire catalog. This helps us gut-check our choices and identify and resolve situations like:
- Narrow categories too small to stand on their own that might be better served when merged with a sibling or two. This is where hubs like City & Settlement and Grand Strategy & 4X came from.
- Overly broad or redundant categories that overlap too much with adjacent genres. These should be broken down into smaller categories or removed altogether. A good example is Action-Adventure; although we have a tag for this, in practice the concept of Action-Adventure doesn’t meaningfully distinguish itself enough from either Action or Adventure alone.
- Games that aren’t being surfaced by any of our proposed categories. This is a wake-up call that we need to add new categories. This check kept us from overlooking the need for categories like Experimental and Exploration & Open World.
And most recently, we launched this experiment in Steam Labs!

Now we want to hear from you! What’s missing? What seems redundant? What is most interesting, and what’s… just not? Share your feedback in the discussions and help us improve the Steam store through Labs.

Steam Labs Experiment 009: Steam News Hub Rolls Out Initial News Channels

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 17:05:33 +0000

Steam Labs Experiment 009: News Hub is nearing completion. As a big step toward its full launch, this update gives you the ability to browse the new and growing collection of participating gaming and technology news sources, and follow those which you wish to have appear in your Steam News Hub. The initial collection of sources available includes top sites serving players across seven languages, with more to come.

More Gaming News Choices

Up until now, the Steam News Hub has been a place to find updates and announcements directly from the developers of games you play, Wishlist, or follow. With this update, you now have a broader selection of news available to you. Add as many of these additional sources to your personalized News Hub as you like. They’re all available free of charge.

Includes Briefs, Articles, Videos, And More

Each news source brings different kinds of news and content, including rich media, screenshots, videos, or detailed guides and reviews. Some news sources are delivering quick blurbs that you can quickly scan in the News Hub, while other sources include their full articles. Included YouTube videos are even playable right in the news feed. And there's always a link to explore more via the news source's own website.

Discover New Sources

A new menu item allows you to explore all the news sources available to see what they write about and help you choose which ones you may be interested in following.

Built on Steam Curators

These news sources are integrated into the News Hub via the Steam Curator system, as many news outlets also write reviews of games. If you happen to be following one of these news sources for their store reviews, you'll find their articles automatically appear in your personalize News Hub.

Fine-Grained Control

Of course, the whole goal behind the Steam News Hub is to give you a personalized view of gaming news, so you get to choose what kind of content you want to see and what kind you don’t. If you wish, you can ignore individual news sources from within your feed by selecting the little menu below a post by that source and selecting 'mute' to exclude their news from your feed or 'unfollow' to completely unfollow them for both news and store reviews.

Or, you can hide all posts from external news sources by clicking "Options & Filters" and un-checking the "Curators You Follow" box.

Explore Now

You can see the news sources available in your language by browsing the recent articles here: http://store.steampowered.com/newshub/collection/press/

About Steam News Hub

Steam Labs Experiment 009: The News Hub is now available for public testing. Through the service, players may browse a personalized Hub to easily find updates, announcements, and events for the games they play and/or have an interest in following. Includes options for receiving email and mobile alerts.

About Steam Labs

Launched in July 2019, Steam Labs is a place where experimental new features can be introduced early in development, tested, and developed in conjunction with the community. For more information, please visit https://store.steampowered.com/labs/

Chat Filtering, Now in Beta through Steam Labs

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 17:09:15 +0000

Available now through Steam Labs, Steam Text & Chat Filtering obscures commonly used strong profanity and slurs sent via chat. The new Steam feature takes the chat filtering we built for games like CS:GO, Destiny 2, and Dota 2, and moves it into Steam for a customized experience that is consistent across supporting games and the Steam client, web, and mobile chat experiences.

We believe users should be empowered to
choose the content they experience on Steam.

With chat filtering, we've obscured the most offensive language shared on Steam. You can alter your settings to control whether profanity and slurs are displayed, and because each player’s tolerance for difficult words is unique, we’ve included the ability to add or remove words to form your personal filter. You may also upload lists of words or phrases from other sources, empowering groups and communities to work together to define and share your own sets of language guidelines. We believe this level of control is especially important given that language is constantly evolving and is used differently among various communities around the world. So with Steam chat filtering, we've made sure you can choose to filter language as much as you want, or not at all.

Read on for more background regarding these features. Then, when you're ready to give them a try, visit Account Settings to join the Steam Labs experiment. We look forward to learning what you think, and to improving these features once you share your feedback.

Why filter user text on Steam?

Steam’s community of players engage with one another in games and online in all sorts of meaningful ways, whether in multiplayer matches, broadcasts and group chats, or through forums, reviews, comments, and other forms of user-generated content. Most of the time, players interactions are positive, friendships are formed, and everyone benefits from sharing our love of gaming with one another.

But some of the time, people have negative experiences on Steam due to their encounters with, in the worst case, bad actors, or simply with others whose tolerance for various forms of language differ from their own. A playful match can quickly turn to a heated competition full of emotion and expression, some of which crosses a line. But where is that line? We've found the answer is different for everyone.

How can we help players protect themselves from encountering online behavior which makes them feel uncomfortable, or worse? Steam’s parental controls can help players remain safe with adult supervision. But those of us who go online without these features in place join a world that is just like the real one, full of exposure that can result in experiences both positive and negative.

For those of you who engage with Steam online, we have invested in systems for store and community content moderation, which are enabled by default. Content available on our store is reviewed for accuracy in reporting content of various ratings. Profane and hateful language are obscured in forums, user reviews, and user comments. Potentially inappropriate imagery posted to the Steam Community is blurred by default preemptively, when detected by image recognition or reported by users. Reports of abusive users are moderated and resolved, as appropriate.

While we continue to develop longer-term solutions in this space, Steam users are in search of ways to empower themselves now in the face of online communication which crosses their personal line. So we have built a simple system to filter strong profanity and slurs. We hope you’ll give them a try, and let us know what you think. As always, we look forward to improving Steam with your feedback.

What will I experience with Steam chat filtering enabled?

Any commonly used strong profanity and slurs, plus specific words a user has added to their filtered list will be obscured to them if sent from others via text while chat filtering is enabled. These words will be replaced with symbols.

Note that our filtering does not catch all profanity and slurs. If you see a word you wish you hadn’t in chat, adding it to your filtered list will help us improve our filtering for all Steam users while immediately updating your own experience to avoid seeing that word again in chat.

Also note that the user who enters any filtered words will see exactly what they’ve typed, even if they have filtering enabled. Whether others see it too will depend upon whether they have filtering of these word enabled.

Now that you can identify these words in chat, why not ban them outright?

While we do ban profanity and slurs from being displayed in more public places like user reviews, comments, forums, and broadcasts on Steam, we do not want to block any user text in chat, but rather, empower users to choose what they see from others.

We know marginalized groups can reclaim language for themselves, and we don’t want to stand in the way of enabling groups of Steam users from doing so when chatting with one another on Steam. So players have an option to see profanity and slurs from their Steam Friends, if they wish.

Where is this filtering applied?

* Steam Chat
* Supporting Games
* In the future, we may apply these same settings across more forms of user-generated content

What's on your filtered lists, and how did you decide?

We have two lists. The first consists of commonly used strong profanity, which players requested we separate in early development of these features. The second consists of commonly used slurs against various racial, religious, ethnic, and other identifying groups.

We built our English lists from a variety of sources, then searched for instances of them across a large sample of in-game chat. Based on this sample, we've found that by filtering variants of the top 5 most commonly used strongly profane or hateful words, we can eliminate about 75% of profanity and slurs used in chat. Over 56% of the instances of profanity or slurs found in our sample were a variant of f***. Another 10% of them were variants of s***. Another 10% were instances of potty-mouth school yard language we've chosen not to filter as strong profanity or slurs. The remaining 24% of the instances were strong profanity and slurs we found to be used commonly enough that we've also added them to our lists.

We will continue to refine these lists based on the words you choose to allow or block on Steam.

How can I customize my filters?

Visit your Steam account preferences, where you'll discover Community Content Preferences including the new Text & Chat Filtering settings. Here you can disable profanity or all filtering, exclude messages from Steam Friends when filtering these things, and enter words to always or never filter, or upload lists to do the same.

F U Steam, how do I turn this thing off?

If you've joined the experiment and find you'd prefer to see strong profanity and slurs, you are free to disable some or all of these filters, or otherwise customize them as you see fit.

Why is this a Lab? What sort of feedback are you looking for?

Chat filtering will soon ship to all Steam users, in response to user and partner requests. The purpose of this experiment is to understand whether the tools we provide successfully empower users to control the chat content you experience on Steam. We'll continue to refine them based on your feedback, so we hope you'll join the conversation and share your thoughts.

I'm a game developer. How can I leverage Steam chat filtering in my game?

Check out our Steamworks Text Filtering API Documentation for information about how you can take advantage of Steam chat filtering in your game.