Steam Update Adds Community Recommendations to the Home Page

For the last year, Steam Labs has been experimenting with a number of new ways to improve the user experience. Some of these experiments have proven more successful than others, but one has actually graduated to the Steam homepage: community recommendations! Now, Steam users can immediately see what others are enjoying on the platform. Visitors can scroll through various recommendations on the page, each with an accompanying quote and a link to the full user review. With the sheer number of games currently available on Steam, this should prove to be quite helpful to a lot of different users.

Adding community reviews to the homepage is just one of the ways that Steam Labs is trying to help gamers decide what to play next. One of the other successful Steam Labs experiments has been the Interactive Recommender. This tool helps Steam users see what games they might want to purchase next, based on what they’ve already been playing on Steam. Users can even make adjustments so that it doesn’t factor in games that the user has played but didn’t enjoy.

The Interactive Recommender technology is also used in another successful Steam Labs experiment: Play Next. While the Interactive Recommender is there to help gamers find the next title they might want to purchase, Play Next helps those with larger Steam libraries decide what to jump into next. This information is gleaned by comparing the user’s play history with that of other Steam users.

Steam continues to look for new ways to make the user experience as friendly as possible. In the history of video games as a medium, gamers have never had so many options available at a single time. Unfortunately, that can make finding something to play more of a chore than it has to be. While these changes might seem minor, they should make for a much more enjoyable experience.

Are you a fan of community recommendations appearing on the Steam homepage? Do you have trouble deciding what to play next on the service? Let us know in the comments or share directly on Twitter at @Marcdachamp to talk all things gaming!