Valve wants to “add transparency” to the Steam store

Valve intends to provide users with more information about the mechanisms of the Steam store.

This was announced by Valve employee Robin Walker in the official Steam blog.

He explained that Valve wants to make the work of the Steam store algorithms more visual and optimize the accuracy of the results for each member of the Steam community.

Walker said that now for Valve, it is not always possible to assess how well the algorithm guesses the interests of users, and in which cases it is wrong.

He compared this to the previously existing problem of match selection in Dota 2, which also worked according to criteria unknown to users.

When Valve discovered the principle of operation of this algorithm (in that case, matches were selected according to the ranks of the players), users were able to more accurately identify problems and report errors to the developer.

An example of the transparency of the store is the new explanatory text that accompanies the “Steam Recommendations” function.

It shows a “checklist” of words by which the Steam algorithm decides to recommend a particular game to the user.

The list includes good reviews, recommendations from curators, whether the game is on your friends’ wish list, and other factors.

Walker stressed that Valve is interested in the opinion of all users and takes it into account when planning changes to make the Steam store more efficient for both players and game publishers.

He also invited readers of the blog to express their opinion about what they read in the comments under the post.

Source: Steam blog