Since you're waiting for Cyberpunk to download and for the Steam servers to un-melt, LET'S TALK ABOUT THE GREATEST POTENTIAL CHANGE TO STEAM DISCOVERY IN RECENT HISTORY THAT JUST CASUALLY DROPPED FIVE MINUTES AGO

Steam Labs Experiment 10:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/SteamLabs/announcements/detail/2379537344925141078

#gamedev

Okay I might be over-hyping it a little, but forgive me, I got to work on this back when I was at Steam Labs over 6 months ago, and I haven't been able to talk about it until now due to NDA.

This.
Is.
A.
Big.
Deal.

A thread, as the children say. 1/X

So what is this? It's not live for everyone yet, it's an opt in feature you have to turn on. So go do that right now!

https://store.steampowered.com/labs/ 

What this feature does is give a dedicated "home" to just about every sizeable niche on steam.

These pages have all the stuff - carousels, recommended new releases, and individual charts (New & Trending, Top Sellers, What's Popular, Top Rated, Upcoming)

https://store.steampowered.com/category/action_rogue_like

It's a little window into one slice of Steam, linked straight off the front page.

There's a little bucket of what they call "facets" too to subdivide what you see further.

Maybe they'll expand these in the future to how we do 'em on Game Data Crunch?

https://www.gamedatacrunch.com/steam/list/all/reviews_total/?filter=t42804&field=title,release_date,price,ea_status,review,reviews_total

So this is the homepage for Action Roguelikes. WITHIN this page there's homes for new games, for upcoming games, for popular games, and for specials.

The way we organized the big menu isn't haphazard, either. I'll let the blog post speak for itself.

Major thanks to @Duffadash at the Royal Danish Library for the many many hours talking to us about the science behind classification & taxonomy

Now, there's only so much real estate. And categories don't always stack neatly like russian nesting dolls, boundaries get fuzzy. Tetrising these things into place took a lot of wiggling, and put one thing in place and another one sticks out weirdly. But it's pretty good!

Like what does "Puzzle" have to do with "Adventure & Casual" from a pure taxonomic perspective?

Honestly that's where it wound up; it's important enough to need a home and we're playing 4 dimensional sudoku here give us a break.

Win = If someone can find puzzle games

There was science and measurement and intentionality behind each of the choices that went into this menu, they definitely were not arbitrary. But it's equal parts art & science.

And part of it being a Lab experiment is... maybe it's wrong! Give us your feedback!

The big #1 take home for the big browse update for indie devs....

What are your chance of being #1 on the steam front page? #2? #10? Even for a day?

Not good right?

Now... what are your chances of being #1 in your category? #2? #10? Even for a day?

That's an achievable goal!

And hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, you can BUILD from that achievable goal and relay it into something bigger.

Hopefully in a near future where this graduates from the Lab, steam customers will start bookmarking their favorite category homepages & new niches will blossom.

"BUT LARS!"
"SOME OF THE TAGS ARE WRONG!"

Okay, I can do nothing about that on Steam, but tell me about it for GameDataCrunch, where I'm running my OWN classification experiments, based on expert human classification using fancy efficiency tools: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd3hUXiZ_RooZa7_R4fEVLEKfK0ld7PGezUzlMbs3l00Lcxwg/viewform

If you made it all the way to the end of this thread AND you think this feature is good then PLEASE PLEASE:

1) If you have an email for a steam rep EMAIL THEM RIGHT NOW AND TELL THEM

2) If you don't, tweet at @steamworks and TELL THEM

3) Leave a comment on the blog post

The end of the blog post has the full design process. I'm really glad to see this made it through to the final draft. It outlines all of the behind the scenes stuff, and explains how everything I and everyone else at Steam Labs did culminated in this project