Steam's Recommendations Will Now Show Popular Games Less Often
https://tinyurl.com/y5xcjk2b
Last October, Steam’s algorithm briefly went haywire, filling users’ “More
Like This” recommendation sections with popular games while negatively
affecting under-the-radar indies who needed the exposure. At the time, Valve
chalked this up to “a bug” which it said it corrected, but smaller
developers complain that Steam’s recommendations have continued to let them
down ever since. Now Valve says it’s changed recommendation sections to
de-prioritize bigger games and focus more on personalized selections for
individual users.
Valve began its announcement post by admitting that recommendations had some
issues. “Previously, when customers would look for games by browsing the
recommendation feed at the bottom of the homepage or the ‘More Like This’
sections, they weren’t seeing as many different games as we would’ve liked,
” the company wrote. “Furthermore, we were receiving lots of feedback that
‘Recommended for You’ felt too biased towards only the most popular games
and didn’t feel very personalized.”
So Valve went on a bug hunt.
“We found some bugs, such as the ‘Similar by Tags’ section of the
Recommendation Feed, which had a bug that top-rated games (a category that
doesn’t change very often) were driving too much of what players saw,”
Valve wrote. “We changed that. We also found that in some places our
timescale used to calculate popularity was too narrow, resulting in
unpredictable visibility for some games. So we expanded the time period we
use in those calculations.”
These changes should now be available to all Steam users. Valve tested them
on a small segment of users prior to launch and found that the fixes resulted
in users clicking on recommended games more often and visiting the pages of a
greater number of individual games.
“In these changes, ‘Recommended for You’ became less biased towards
popular games, and showed games that are more relevant to individual
customers,” Valve wrote of the algorithm test. “As it turned out, customers
in the experiment group were more likely to click on the games shown in the
recommendations section, at a rate almost 15% higher than the control group.
The increased personalization means there is an even greater variety of games
being shown in this section, and customer impressions are more evenly
distributed among them.”
There was also a 75% increase in the number of unique games visited, and a
48% increase in average visits per game compared to a control group with the
prior popular-game-loving, Mountain-Dew-chugging version of the algorithm.
For years now, Steam has had trouble surfacing smaller games to users who
might be interested in them. This has frustrated indie developers, many of
whom now see potential success on the platform as a crapshoot even if they
generate a fair amount of buzz around their game pre-release. Recommendations
have been an especially big thorn in developers’ sides. Between this
algorithmic change and experimental new tools like an AI that scans your
playtime and helps you figure out what to buy next, it seems like Valve is
finally making a concerted effort to minimize the problem.
Valve believes these early results signal a change for the better on Steam.
“We’re encouraged by these results and have now rolled them out to everyone,
” the company wrote. “We continue to make changes and run experiments like
this in order to improve Steam’s existing features, while we also explore
entirely different ways for customers to find games they love.”
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簡單來說，Steam以前的推薦中熱門遊戲的比例太高了。
很多獨立遊戲廠商也多次抱怨過。
所以Steam大修了演算法，現在熱門遊戲出現在Steam的各推薦位的比例下降了。
文中有提到細節和改善的詳細數據，因為我英文太菜就不譯了。