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?

  • Newtra@pawb.socialOP
    1·
    8 months 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@pawb.social
      2·
      8 months 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.