[Steam Labs is a sort of ongoing PTR for Valve to test and iterate on new Steam features before they are released to everyone. To celebrate, Valve posted an update that recaps a year's worth of experimentation, gives a little preview of what's coming next, and finally launched the "Community Recommendations" storefront feature they began testing last year.

"Community Recommendations showcases your reviews by posting them on the front page." The result is a vibrant community in the store, and users will always know what titles players are currently enjoying and why."

That is.

That sounds straightforward enough, and many of the recommendations are useful. But some are a different kind of goldmine: the system seems to employ the first few lines of user reviews without regard to their actual content (or lack thereof), which leads to some pretty interesting places.

Robin said today that Steam has become tiresome.

Then, along with an overview of features we've seen before, such as the Interactive Recommender, Play Next, and the improved search feature, this update also touches on some Steam ideas that never made it to the finish line. Automated Show is intended to be a fully automated system for "producing entertainment pieces about games," with features such as narration, "theme-driven auto-curation," and 2- to 30-minute showtimes.

However, the longer format did not work "because viewers usually leave within the first few minutes of these shows," according to Valve, and if you want to focus on a specific topic, like the Steam Awards, doing it manually is a better way anyway It turns out.

The planned Deep Dive feature suffered a similar fate: the idea of using an algorithm to recommend games based on initial selection allowed Valve to further tweak Steam's tagging and recommendation system to "relate to big events Although inspired by tools to "identify and organize games" and led Valve to consider a "new navigation system" that it planned to "experiment with in the lab" in the future, it was a "tough sell.

The Steam News Hub experiment is still ongoing, more work is being done on the Steam search feature, and the Micro Trailers feature continues to be developed; Valve is also looking at new ways to browse Steam, and has "new entry points, more engaging Valve is also looking at new ways to browse Steam, offering "new entrances, more engaging ways to browse, and more tools for filtering while browsing," and is open to suggestions from users.