The "Smarter" Storefront: Steam's Dramatic New Look Makes a Terrible First Impression

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

Digital distribution platform Steam has undergone a serious facelift this week, and it's safe to say that initial reviews are mixed at best. Steam's problem of late has been that the increased volume of new games being released on the service has made it difficult to find the new content you'll actually like. In some ways the new layout and features are trying to address this issue, but I'm not sure they're doing so very well.

Case in point: When I loaded up Steam this afternoon and flicked through the games it had determined I would enjoy, I came across The Stomping Land. The Stomping Land, for those who missed the hype a while back, is a crafting and survival game in early access that prominently loads of awesome dinosaurs. I like dinosaurs, I like survival, I like crafting -- check, check and check. So what's the problem? I'll tell you.

The Stomping Land isn't actually for sale anymore. In yet another recent video game crowdsourcing scandal, Steam removed The Stomping Land from sale after updates ceased and the team behind it seemingly vanished into the aether. There's a lot of talk of expired contracts and such, and it might be too soon to accuse this game of being dead in the water, but one thing is for sure: Steam shouldn't be recommending a game that I literally cannot purchase from them.

In addition to that little snafu, the new releases I'm always eager to peruse have been buried even further, making it harder to see beyond the narrow box that Steam's algorithms have placed me in. On the other hand, these changes come with a new curating system that allows users to share collections of games based on themes or taste which could compensate for that (I'll be talking a bit more about the curator feature later this week.) Suffice it to say for now that even though new UIs and features always take some time to get used to, Steam's new look may still have some kinks that need to be worked out.

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Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart on Twitter, Iris Ophelia in Second Life) has been writing about virtual worlds and video games for nearly a decade, and has had her work featured on Paste, Kotaku, Jezebel and The Mary Sue.

Comments

[Pussycat Catnap]

algorithms recommending things to me is why I tossed out Pandora. It can detect all manner of technical differences between things - but not the important factor for me: the subject matter of the lyrics. My chosen genre of music (Roots Reggae) is identical in sound to another genre (Dancehall), but the two are polar opposites in subject matter (think Leftist Gospel vs Gangster Rap).

Steam should focus instead on the curated recommendations format.

Human beings can pick up on the subtleties that an algorithm will miss, like "is this game sexist" or "is the animation well done" or "does that color palette annoy my eyes?"

[Ezra]

Side note. It'd be interesting to get updated impressions of Desura post-LL acquisition, Iris. I recall you saying it might've been the smartest thing LL has done. I kind of think they're losing ground to newcomers like itch.io, which I buy from, but I still keep up with the Desura twitter account and have been impressed with the roundup videos and the like, but don't think I've bought anything there in a long while.