I’ll be honest folks: I didn’t know that Steam’s Personal Calendar feature was still technically in testing. I’ve been using it here and there to keep track of what’s come out recently or what’s coming out imminently, and have generally found it to be fairly reflective of the kinds of games I was interested in. It just worked! Yet lo and behold, a post from Valve went out yesterday announcing that the feature has launched out of Steam Labs “and is considered a full feature of the Steam Store.”
The feature, if you’ve missed it, is “another way to see recommended games for you, showing both recently released and upcoming games filtered down to the set of games we think you are most likely to be interested in,” as Valve explain it anyway. “It uses your recently played games to find people with similar playtime profiles to you, and then looks at the games those players have been adding to their wishlist or playing.” I do wonder if there’s a bit more going under the hood here, as my playtime count is all over the place, with nothing above 50 hours on there, and that’s an exception to the norm (I’m from more of a console background, alright).
But even still, my recommendations do remain pretty good, showing me games that I have since added to my wishlist. I’m never opposed to new discovery tools, especially considering how bad Valve can actually be at that kind of thing. Apparently the recommendation system refreshes daily “to incorporate the latest data. In reality you aren’t likely to see your recommendations change all that much from day to day, but as time goes by you will obviously see new things pop up as the 8-week horizon of the calendar marches forward, or as games lock in their release dates.”
This comes as part of a broader swathe of changes Valve have been introducing to Steam over the past couple of years, including one from last month that will change its homepage discounts and events section to be a bit more algorithm based. Perhaps it’s some kind of weird prepwork for that new Half-Life they’re almost definitely making but only talk about accidentally.
