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A comment on Steam’s discovery algorithm killed my sales. Parent comment

Re:Steam’s discovery algorithm killed my sales by sbarre on Monday December 03, 2018 @12:04PM (#18590343)
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.

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Re:Steam’s discovery algorithm killed my sales by netcan on Monday December 03, 2018 @12:20PM (#18590537)
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.

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Re:Steam’s discovery algorithm killed my sales by sbarre on Monday December 03, 2018 @07:32PM (#18594686)
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.

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