Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: Steam, Steam TV, valve

Valve to Improve Steam TV and Game Discoverability in 2019

Published Mon, 14 Jan 2019 18:10:02 -0600

Last updated Mon, 14 Jan 2019 22:04:24 -0600

Valve teased its plans for 2019 in a Steam Community post today, which mostly looked at how the digital store held up in 2018. The end of Valve's retrospective included a segment on what Steam users can expect to find in the coming year. While the list released doesn't reflect the entirety of Valve's plans for the year, it is a pretty good hint at what we can expect.

As Valve states:

Doing this sort of retrospective is useful to us as a team, because it helps us better understand what we've done and where we should go from here. While we feel like we've accomplished a lot in 2018, there's still a ton more work to do, features to build, and hard problems to solve. Here's a sneak peek at a few of the more notable things we plan to ship this year.

Valve's plans for 2019 so far seem to include better discoverability, updates to Steam TV and the PC Cafe Program, and even a new Steam Chat mobile app:

Store Discoverability: We're working on a new recommendation engine powered by machine-learning, that can match players to games based on their individual tastes. Algorithms are only a part of our discoverability solution, however, so we're building more broadcasting and curating features and are constantly assessing the overall design of the store.
Steam China: We've partnered with Perfect World to bring Steam onshore into China. We'll reveal more details about this in the coming months.
Steam Library Update: Some long awaited changes to the Steam Client will ship, including a reworked Steam Library, built on top of the technology we shipped in Steam Chat.
New Events System: We're upgrading the events system in the Steam Community, enabling you to highlight interesting activities in your games like tournaments, streams, or weekly challenges.
Steam TV: We're working on expanding Steam TV beyond just broadcasting specific tournaments and special events, in order to support all games.
Steam Chat: We're going to ship a new Steam Chat mobile app, so you can share your favorite GIFs with your friends while on the go.
Steam Trust: The technology behind Trusted Matchmaking on CS:GO is getting an upgrade and will become a full Steam feature that will be available to all games. This means you'll have more information that you can use to help determine how likely a player is a cheater or not.
Steam PC Cafe Program: We are going to officially ship a new PC Cafe Program so that players can have a good experience using Steam in hundreds of thousands of PC Cafes Worldwide.