Join The Club
Plenty has been said about the hundreds of games that launch on Steam each week and the many features Valve has concocted over the years to funnel that waterfall of content through a straw an average player can actually sip on. Latest among them is the new "personal calendar" feature and you know what? I think this is finally the perfect way to recommend games to me.
A small Personal Calendar module now appears on the Steam homepage when you're logged in, showing a couple upcoming releases for each of the next five days that Steam judges you may like based on what's already on your wishlist and the tags of games you typically play. The calendar actually rolled out earlier this month in a Steam blog post but, look, June's been too busy for me to casually surf Steam and also the announcement really undersells the feature.
When you click through to the full Personal Calendar page, you'll see a list of games released in the past month, some from the past week, and then a forward looking calendar of the next two months showing a per-day preview of a few games (up to six for a single day, on mine) that you might like. You can also make the calendar page more specific by filtering for a specific tag like "farming sim" or "city builder" and some other options like games per page and showing or hiding games that are already on your wishlist.
I've given Steam deserved grief for leaning too hard on algorithms to tackle the Sisyphean task of curation, but this solution is the most visually attractive and immediately comprehensible to me, a human, that I've seen from the store in years.
I never really got on with Steam's Discovery Queue, for instance. I get the logic in attempting to pluck games for me out of the mad bucket of Legos that is Steam's glut of releases. Just shoving a new game in front of me every time I click "next in queue" doesn't really help me make sense of my options (and always reminded me of the StumbleUpon browser extension from the late '00s).
A calendar just works though. It's more digestible than Steam's storewide list of upcoming games or the queue that serves just one game at a time. My calendar reminded me that a new Game Freak game, Beast of Reincarnation, comes out on August 3, the day before House House's next game Big Walk, which is the day before the 1.0 launch of Fields of Mistria on August 5. That's going to be a big week for me!
The fact that it mixes in games it thinks I might like with things on my wishlist and the 1.0 launches for Early Access games already in my library is a genuinely good view of how I think about what I want to play next month. Thankfully, it also doesn't recommend a game for every single day which would have taken the concept from refreshing back to overwhelming.
It seems to do quite a decent job of surfacing smaller indie games I've not heard of too, though your mileage may vary if you don't routinely interact with small, weird games for work. It's shown me lots of options including a cute pixelated management game called Cat Isle. The calendars for my fellow PCG folks have included Bingle Bingle for Morgan Park who described it as "roulette Balatro" at a glance. Dinoblade for Lincoln Carpenter, and Cat Chess for Tyler Wilde who made us all watch a trailer of cats battling during a meeting. I think the feature is working.
There was a bit of concern from indie devs earlier this month fearing that changes to the "new releases" module on the storefront would push visibility away from small games. We'll have to wait for folks to report back on how the calendar feature has affected their discoverability. Speaking as a player though, I'm way more likely to peruse and buy from this screen than an overwhelming list of loosely upcoming stuff.
