Steam Adds Personal Calendar With Personalized Game Recommendations
Valve has launched Personal Calendar on its Steam game store, showing users recently released games that match their tastes. The feature is available on the store's homepage.
Valve, the company behind the Steam PC game distribution platform, released a new feature called Personal Calendar on Friday. It is available on the Steam store homepage and helps players keep track of recently released games that fit their preferences.
Valve says the tool fills a gap between two existing options: browsing for trending or niche games, and getting recommendations based on an individual's gaming tastes.
How the recommendations work
Personal Calendar suggests games by comparing a user's recently played titles with those of other players who have similar profiles. It also looks at logged playtime and wishlists. Valve notes that trying a game for just a few minutes will not change the algorithm much, because it mainly weighs the games a person has spent a lot of time on.
The calendar is refreshed daily, since the user-specific algorithms are retrained regularly with the latest data. However, few day-to-day changes are expected. New suggestions are more likely to appear over an eight-week window, or when developers confirm release dates for upcoming games.
Testing and background
The feature went through several months of testing and feedback in Steam Labs, Valve's program for trying out experimental changes to store and discovery tools. According to Valve, players click on more than 2,000 different games within Personal Calendar during an average 24-hour period.
The feature is part of Valve's ongoing response to player complaints that the Steam store is too cluttered or hard to navigate. Earlier this year, Steam introduced a new storefront with a search menu and "Categories" to make finding new games easier.
