Curation? Who needs it!

Go ahead and boot up Steam for me. Underneath the ad banner for whoever paid to be there for that day and the featured and recommended sections, you'll find a section titled discounts and events. As it currently stands, this section is hand curated by Valve to highlight some site-wide relevant sales. But Valve have been changing Steam up a lot in recent years, namely a widening of every aspect of it, and now this discount and events section will move away from being curated to being "more dynamic and personalized for each customer."

As Valve explain it in a blog post, their "goal with Steam’s discovery features is to show the right game to the right customer, so we spent the last few months experimenting with replacing some curated spots with dynamic and personalized recommendations. By featuring games in a more personalized way in the Discounts & Events section, we were able to show 10x more games to customers in a given day in that section. As a result, we saw meaningful increases in store page visits, wishlists, and cart additions." Probable translation: they made more money from their changes.

In an ideal world, this gets more eyes on smaller, lesser known games compared to the big ones that already make enough money (though somehow never enough money to not lay people off). I'm just also hesitant at the idea of yet another algorithm in the world; who will Steam reward? Who will it punish? Valve say that they "have confidence this approach is better aligned with our goal, and results in a better experience for customers and developers. The constraint of a manually managed calendar doesn't make as much sense with such diverse customer tastes and so many relevant deals for customers available at any given time," but I guess we'll find out whenever they put these changes into effect.

Speaking of: "We don't have a definite date for implementing these changes and are still tuning the details, but we wanted to set expectations. We don't believe this will be perfect right away, but we are confident the new system will result in better outcomes for customers and developers and are eager to share all the details once we have them." Here's hoping the lack of perfection won't screw up any smaller developer's days.