Valve is changing the way Steam surfaces games due to a problem with too many low-effort, AI-generated games flooding the platform. This is significant because it impacts which games are presented to you on your store page, as well as your ability to discover quality indie games. Valve has acknowledged that their current recommendations aren't doing a good job at cutting out this much spam.
Valve plans to modify algorithms to surface quality games
Valve representatives Tom Giardino and Marc Wilkinson spoke about this at Steam Indie Connect in South Korea on October 27th. They noted that there are many people within Valve working on solutions to deal with this flood of AI content. Valve's plan is to modify their recommendation algorithm to emphasize quality over quantity instead of trying to outright ban any tools.
Their goal is to make good games easier to discover without wanting to control what software developers are allowed to use. Valve has made it very clear that they do not want to judge the quality of games based on AI or limit the toolkit available to developers. They are just looking to improve how their personalized recommendations filter content after certain discovery phases like Steam Next Fest.
When Steam Next Fest happens now, games are shown randomly first before the personalized algorithms kick in. This means low-quality games may be exposed first before their personalized algorithms can do their job. Valve admits that their current first-time randomness gives low-quality games an opportunity to be seen before their system can learn about your preferences. Their goal is to find ways to better surface quality games through these discovery phases to cut through the clutter.
Valve is in the process of working on certain algorithm modifications to emphasize quality. We don't know exactly what those modifications are, but it sounds like they are looking to incorporate user behavior data earlier on during discovery phases to help better filter content. There's active work being done within Valve as a direct response to the current amount of AI submissions flooding the platform.
Source: NotebookCheck
I hope they fix the Next Fest shuffle. It is hard to find good stuff when random spam shows up first. Will the new algorithm use wishlists earlier in that process?
They likely need to prioritize signal over noise. Using wishlist data early acts like a pre-filter. This stops low effort titles from consuming attention slots.