I’ve tried to love Itch, EGS and GOG, but the thing that keeps me coming back to Steam is the ability to say “No, I’m not going to play that, stop showing it”. The other stores shove unwanted ads in my face every time I visit, and it’s always for the same old games I have no interest in. Steam helps me on my quest to find the diamonds in the rough, and every time I check the front page I usually see 5+ games that I’d consider playing.

Anyone else feel game shops should do more to help us find the right games? What’s your strategy for finding good games with so much trash out there?

  • Sloan the Serval
    6·
    1 year ago

    It’s a great feature to have, and honestly I actually haven’t had to use it much either. I’ve found that Steam does a good job curating things properly based on my library, and the way Steam advertises its listings is mostly unintrusive.

    Honestly, I think Steam’s “suggestions” system is the only form of advertisement that’s actually gotten me to buy something. I wouldn’t have known about RPG Maker VX Ace without out otherwise.

    • NewtraOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      Which “suggestions”? I find each showcase on the website has its own quirks:

      • “Featured & Recommended” at the top of the store page gives me great recommendations, but rarely updates, always looping through the same ~20 games unless I ignore/wishlist all of them to force it to refresh
      • “Recommended based on the games you play” and the genre-specific sections never seem to update for me. They’re all full of stale “maybe I’ll look closer if I’m in the mood for that genre (which never happens)” games
      • “Discovery queue” is always fresh but starts to devolve to only porn and low-effort shovelware unless I proactively ignore them
      • “More like this” on a game page seems only show more popular games that I already know about

      To get to 50k ignores, I made a script to ignore whole pages of search results, and used it with combinations of tags I had absolutely no interest in (e.g. “multiplayer + sports”, “sexual content + match 3 puzzle”, “zombies”, etc.). This made the Discovery Queue MUCH more relevant.

      • Sloan the Serval
        2·
        1 year ago

        All of them, really. I don’t really go through the queue that much but I’ve never been bothered by what shows up in the “Featured”, “Recommended based on the games you play” or “more like this” sections. It does tend to be more of the just popular or big-name stuff but it generally does a good job of at least picking things related to what’s already in my library.

    • NewtraOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      Perhaps my problem is with ~1500 games, I have so many of each tag in my library that Steam can’t figure out my niches. Or maybe the hundreds of crap games I got from old bundles have convinced them I love shovelware 🙃

      • Sloan the Serval
        2·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, that might have a part in that. I’ve only got a few hundred games, many of them very niche like bullethells and AG racers.