Marek L.• February 27, 2020
Recently Steam has revealed to the public a new set of experimental features under the "Steam Labs" program. This alone is pretty exciting, but the way Valve altered the recommendation system in favor of Steam Curators is even more. In short, Steam Curators are now regularly featured on the front page of the Steam Store, and their reviews are displayed even to people who are not actively following anyone.
This is not some kind of aggressive marketing, though. Valve knows that displaying relevant content is the only way to benefit from these changes long term. And that is the moment when AI (Artificial Intelligence) and machine learning come in. Based on previously played games, the algorithm picks the most relevant matches from the Curator's portfolio and displays them to the user. Do you often play visual novels? Expect to see recommendations from a Curator page focused on anime and text-heavy games. Are you more into Indie titles? Then you might very well end up seeing one of our reviews!
That being said, these changes lead to a major increase in visibility of our reviews, and in the end, all involved parties benefit from them. Steam users can easily discover new games, developers get free publicity for their games and Steam Curators? They are now more important than ever!