{"id":96505,"date":"2019-07-11T22:05:00","date_gmt":"2019-07-11T22:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/346497"},"modified":"2019-07-11T22:05:00","modified_gmt":"2019-07-11T22:05:00","slug":"steam-labs-is-valves-new-home-for-experimental-steam-features","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2019\/07\/11\/steam-labs-is-valves-new-home-for-experimental-steam-features\/","title":{"rendered":"Steam Labs is Valve’s new home for experimental Steam features"},"content":{"rendered":"

Valve is rolling out a handful of new experimental features for Steam, but those additions won\u2019t be headed right to the storefront\u2019s homepage.<\/p>\n

Instead, the company has launched a home for toying with new and potentially interesting features called Steam Labs<\/a>, and opened up access to the first three additions to the general public.<\/p>\n

The tools and tests found within range in size and scope, but each is a potential peek at solutions Valve has pitched and mulled over internally to address some of the shortcomings of its massively popular game platform.<\/p>\n

The Interactive Recommender<\/a> is among these, and has been gathering no small amount of buzz<\/a> from developers curious about the neural net-powered game recommendation tool. More about that specific experiment can be found here<\/a>, but, in short, the tool uses play data, machine learning, and other interactive criteria to create compelling and personalized game recommendations for Steam users. <\/p>\n

Aside from that, Valve has also launched two video-focused creations in Steam Labs that each highlight new games on the platform in their own ways.<\/p>\n

Micro Trailers<\/a> generates short, six-second long trailers for games on Steam, an experimental feature Valve says attempts to give Steam users a way to quickly get their eyes on titles they might be interested in. Valve has generated a handful of these already, broken down in slightly different presentation styles over ono its Steam Labs page.<\/p>\n

The other video-focused creation, The Automated Show<\/a>, aims to act as a sort of daily digest for new Steam releases. That experiment features a half hour long show (generated by a bot) that quickly runs through new additions for the day across categories like \u2018new and popular\u2019 and individual genres.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now, the automated show bot is a black obelisk that sits in Boston, Massachusetts, and will only generate an episode when someone speaks a complex series of prime numbers into its electronic ears,\u201d explains Valve. \u201cIt’s mostly-automated, but requires a human to kick it off. Should we continue with this experiment, we’ll want to make it something that runs daily or weekly without human intervention.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Valve is rolling out a handful of new experimental features for Steam, but those additions won\u2019t be headed right to the storefront\u2019s homepage. Instead, the company has launched a home for toying with new and potentially interesting features called Steam Labs, and opened up access to the first three additions to the general public. The tools […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":96506,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96505\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}