Steam's discovery and categorization are pretty awful. Despite never having purchased an anime visual novel, played one, or even looked at a store page for one, Steam advertised them to me nonstop on the front page. I blacklisted anime. Problem solved. But then I just get lots of trash tier roguelikes. A couple years later, I realized that blacklisting anime actually blacklisted all Japanese games entirely -- even those without an anime art style, which is too bad.

My guess is that because those games are so inexpensive, they probably sell a ton of units irrespective of price and category, and if the system is optimized to show stuff that is moving a lot of units in a short period of time, it will bubble to the top.

The other day, the only good recommendation I've seen in a long time came up: Battle Brothers has a new DLC, even long after the devs said they were not going to make any. But that's the only one I can really think of.

I think most personalization features on marketplaces are kind of overrated. I care way, way, way more about sales than I care about 'personalization.' I am just about never going to buy something at full retail apart from daily essentials.

I think his problem more realistically is that his category is extremely weird. Adventure solitaire RPG? How would you even begin to SEO that product page in a way that didn't cause a ton of confusion?

Even something like Thronebreaker, which is basically a solo player card game RPG, does not try to distinguish itself on search. It promotes itself based on the strength of the Witcher brand and on Gwent.

> Despite never having purchased an anime visual novel, played one, or even looked at a store page for one

I'm going to be honest, given this information I'm wondering how you know you hate them. Any individual recommendation is likely low-quality, but that's mostly thanks to Sturgeon's law - Steam certainly has a good enough grasp of what I'm looking for in a game to point me at the right genres.

Honestly man I don't need to play an anime visual novel to know I won't like it. I don't like visual novels and if it's anime it's probably about high schoolers.

...Right. Okay. Stereotypes and a failure to do basic research is not a reason to disregard an entire genre. Go play Umineko and Steins;Gate. Have fun.

You're missing the point here; If I wanted to block shooters, would you try to defend shooters - saying that they don't influence young kids to shoot up school etc.

You would be right of course, but thats not the point. It's not harming anybody, and nobody has to use such a feature.

If you'd told me you had a library of 3d action-adventure games and fighting games and hated shooters because they were plotless, mindless gorefests, I would recommend Portal, Half-Life 2, and Halo. They are dissimilar enough from genre's stereotypical dreck that I'd recommend them even assuming your statement was completely accurate, and good enough in absolute terms that I think you'd be likely to enjoy them. I agree that there are a ton of awful VNs out there, just like there are a ton of awful shooters, but I hate seeing people throwing the baby out with the bathwater based on sweeping generalizations that simply aren't correct.

If you want more specifics: You complained about VNs as being "anime" and then said that all anime was about high schoolers. I provided recommendations for high-quality VNs that were neither anime nor about high school.

I have 344 games in my library accumulated since the day Steam came out over 10 years ago. They fit pretty neatly into RPG, action/FPS, strategy, and the occasional odd indie that is hard to categorize. Nothing there in my purchase or play history indicates that I want to buy a $0.99 high school drama. Chances are I will never buy one until I die at this point. One issue might also just be that I own everything I'm likely to buy, so it just runs out of stuff to suggest.

Yeaaah, knowing you're into RPGs and random indies, I'd recommend JRPGs, and if you already have any JRPGs I'd add VNs. Certainly the options involving less high school relationship drama, which is why I say that the specifics are an issue and that 90% of everything is crap, but, well, there are some extraordinarily good non-teenage-relationship-drama stories out there in JRPG and VN land.

Some recs in that direction, based on what's presumably a collection of western RPGs and FPS games: Baten Kaitos (gamecube), Most Final Fantasy games in the single digits, Golden Sun I and II (gameboy advance), Umineko (PC), Steins;Gate (PC).

The point here is not about this particular developer, but at about recommendation engines in general and the challenges they pose.

I'm not arguing against algorithms here, there are just too many games on Steam to show everyone a raw list of products and let them fend for themselves.. You need some kind of automated curation.

But as a seller of products, you have to put all your faith in the marketplace's ability to put your products in front of the right people as much as possible, and it can be frustrating when you suddenly start seeing data that shows this is happening less, and you don't know why.

Exactly what I meant. They're not meceydoing a bad job, but just having that central decider (human or botmaster) is disheartening.. when things don't go your way.

..it's a gatekeeper, and we have a complicated relationship with those guys.

For sure, I agree and I know exactly where you're coming from..

A decade ago or so I was tasked with writing a recommendation engine for a "creators community" company I worked at, and the feedback we got after launching that feature was pretty much constant for as long as I was still working there.

Everyone wanted to know exactly how it worked (so they could min/max for the logic) and no one was happy with the results.

> When users start complaining about not being shown interesting stuff, then Valve will jump into action.

I'm pretty sure there are a lot of complaints about it, but as much as Valve tries to better the situation there's a significant problem: It is hard to match people with games they'll like based solely on broad metadata about both.

From the article, we know there is a problem with the algorithm change because the "other product pages" graph stops matching the other graphs, see the orange line here after the start of October: http://greyaliengames.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/RegencyTra...

> every time his game was being promoted, somebody else's wasn't

This isn't necessarily true. Imagine a recommendation list of 4 items being shortened to a list of 3 items... Or 4 small promotional thumbnail links being redesigned into a single larger image link for a single game. That larger image isn't going get 4x the traffic + clicks just because it's 4x bigger.

> This isn't necessarily true. Imagine a recommendation list of 4 items being shortened to a list of 3 items... Or 4 small promotional thumbnail links being redesigned into a single larger image link for a single game. That larger image isn't going get 4x the traffic + clicks just because it's 4x bigger.

But that isn't the case here. "More like this" list was always 12 games. Both before and after the October change.

Steam discovery is and was useless for years. It is not really a place to find games you might like.

> The discovery algorithm serves the consumer first and foremost. When users start complaining about not being shown interesting stuff, then Valve will jump into action.

Anecdotally, I've been seeing users complain about Steam's recommendation algorithm for a long time, on gaming forums like ResetERA.

I don't recall a time when I wasn't hearing people complain about their recommendations. Steam's recommendations are legendarily bad in the circles I hang out in and I don't remember the last time I bought a game off of one. I may never have.

I followed a conversation he started on Twitter about it, and every dev that responded had similar graphs for that time period. Still could be some bias, but there's more than one data point.

His point is, that he suspects AAA games get more favovered, because they make more money for Valve. So good for Valve, not necessarily the consumer who might have been happy with a less expensive indie game as well ...

Steams algorithm sucks, it has a bad habit of recommending games I already own.

But not DLC for those games that I haven't bought yet....

highly naive to consider only new-style algorithmic truths; traditional markets are heavily manipulated at every turn, even under scrutiny and threat, no?

no?