Introducing Steam Labs

While Epic has been committed to its full-scale attack on Steam, Steam has been quietly working behind on the scenes. While many wondered if the service was going to retaliate actively, it turns out that Steam was simply continuing what it was doing - improving the user experience. And just recently it has unveiled Steam Labs - a system that allows users to view, provide feedback, break, and share Steam's latest experiments.

The first three experiments to coincide with Steam Labs' release are:

• Micro Trailers - Six-second trailers for every Steam game.
• Interactive Recommender - The most exciting experiment of the three. Allows machine learning to predict games you'd like based on your library.
• Automatic Show - An automated, daily, half-hour show about Steam Games.

Keep in mind that these experiments are works in progress. In other words, while these experiments may become successful, some may not, and as a result, they will effectively be tossed. But one thing is for sure - these experiments will seek improvements based on user feedback.

But out of the three, I wholly recommend trying the Interactive Recommender. Despite it being fresh and new, it is quite good - almost too good.

You can place a weight on popularity - on a scale between Popular and Niche. You can scale between Older and Newer games (include releases since 10 years ago to six months ago). You can reveal games with only certain genre tags. You can exclude games with certain genre tags. You can also exclude wishlisted games. So yeah, do yourself a favor and give it a try.

My only gripe with this recommender so far is that more genre tags, such as Racing, Horror, Sports, and Puzzle should be included. Other than that, it's off to a great start.