Steam Announces Steam Labs to Let Customers Try New Features and Provide Feedback
Steam wants to help users find their next game. This has led the team at Valve to look for new things to try and now, they’ve created a way for users to try out some things that they’re experimenting with. Steam Labs is a place for Steam users to go and try out some of these experiments and then provide feedback so the developers know what works well and what doesn’t. The first batch of three experiments are already up on the site and they’re interesting. Here’s a quick breakdown:
Micro Trailers
“Absorb every game in the Steam catalog in just seconds. Micro Trailers are six-second looping videos designed to quickly inform viewers about titles on Steam with a presentation that’s easy to skim. This experiment is a fancier version of the Twitter bot of the same name.”
In my opinion, this is both useful and not at the same time. You know how on YouTube, sometimes it’ll play like 3 seconds of a video when you hover your mouse over it? This is the same thing. The problem is that 6 seconds is not very long, and some of them are not great. Some show off some gameplay while others are cinematic. The cinematic ones aren’t that helpful at all. However, if the 6 seconds are done well, it can be seen as improved box art to draw people in to watch the longer trailers.
Interactive Recommender
“This experiment looks at how much you’ve played each game in your Steam library, and uses the magic of machine learning to recommend games you might like. Filter your results by picking games that are popular or niche, and drill down by release date and tags.”
This is probably the most helpful in my opinion. This tool uses machine learning to analyze what games you play and how long you play them to determine what games you’ll like. It even has parameters you can change such as whether you prefer more popular or niche titles as well as the age of a title. It doesn’t appear to work super well right now, but once it is polished, I think it will be very helpful.
Automatic Show
“What if Steam could magically generate a show about the latest and greatest games each day? The automatic show is like one of those cable shopping channels without the super-absorbent chamois cloths.”
Yeah, this is nothing but those Micro Trailers put together with a focus seemingly more on gameplay footage than trailer footage. Arguably, this is more helpful than the Micro Trailers, but it is literally nothing more than 25 minutes of these trailers across various categories.
What do you think of Steam Labs and these possible features?