Last September, Valve launched its new Steam Discovery tools, and today has updated developers on the effects of that update.
A new developer blog post (reproduced on Reddit) outlines both the effects of the Steam Discovery update and how they’re affecting Valve’s strategy for the Steam platform moving forward.
Curators are less relevant than anticipated; at the same time, a much larger number of games is being put in front of Steam buyers on a daily basis on the front page thanks to the update, which allows for more personalized content (from 10-20 to around 4,000).
“The Steam Discovery Update as a whole resulted in a sustained 30 percent increase in views of product pages across Steam, and the discovery queue has contributed almost 75 percent of that total increase in page views,” the post notes.
Another big win is the tagging system: tags “now account for nearly 7 percent of all product page traffic.”
Of note, the update is meant to overall grow Steam’s sales, not just more fairly redistribute existing sales: “In addition to the raw increases in traffic, we’ve also carefully monitored sales data to make sure we’re growing the size of the pie, rather than just adjusting the size of the slices.”
You can read the full post here.
Valve is collecting feedback on the system, so if you’re a Steam developer and you have something to share, it’s time to login and respond to the post on the SteamworksDev group.