Greenlight has proved the catalyst for many Steam improvements, with fresh-faced indie developers driving useful features and functionality. Unfortunately, with anywhere from 20 to 100 games being approved for sale on the digital distributor every few weeks, it’s getting harder to find games from these devs in the sea of new releases. This may become less of an issue however with recent changes to the service.
As described in a news post on Steam, Valve has introduced a “Recently Updated” box on the store front page that highlights new, major updates from developers. In fact, it’s live now if you’d like to see it for yourself.
Developers will have some control over when and how they appear in this section, though the post doesn’t go into much detail. Beyond the front page pull-out, you can hit up a dedicated update section which shows a more verbose list of newly patched titles.
Previously, any sort of update would only appear in that particular game’s news feed, unless it was significant enough for Valve to post about it in Steam’s main feed. Now indies will stand a better chance of getting eyes on their games, especially those that are being updated regularly with content.
Comments
2 responses to “Steam Reveals Discovery Tools For Developers & Recently Updated Page For Users”
Ever heard that saying: You are not stuck in traffic. You ARE traffic.
The visibility problem isn’t really going to be solved by spamming us with updates from so many games that it all becomes a blur that we don’t see any of it. So many games – and not very good ones either – are getting approved now and they’re going to start noticing that getting onto Steam doesn’t mean what it used to in terms of an instant big payday. That payday only came because users weren’t being pelted with ten new games every day. Visibility is only going to improve for these indies when there’s less to look at, less competing with them. Unfortunately, a lot of the people you’re going to see complaining about this are part of the group which could probably stand to be culled.
I foresee a lot of games being ‘patched’ some time soon.