Valve's promised curation update has reached a beta stage, with a select few getting early access to test the new tools and make sure nothing falls through the cracks. This system is targeted at companies, brands, and groups that focus on recommending games on the Steam platform.
As detailed by Valve's blog post, curators will soon be able to compile lists of games they've curated and organize a home base for their curation efforts. In addition, once the update goes wide, Valve will be allowing developers to send games directly to curators through the Curator Connect program.
TechRaptor was one of the lucky sites with an opportunity to join the beta early, so we've organized a breakdown of what other critics, compilers, and curators will have at their disposal in the very near future.
Lists are probably the biggest addition, allowing curators to group games together however they please and give those groups a convenient landing page. The feature is pretty open-ended, allowing for everything from an Editor's Choice selection to just games featuring references to your favorite anime.
These selections will be randomized on list pages, allowing each selected game an equal chance in the spotlight. For our part, we've created a few pages to browse through, including past winners of our year-end awards and the best games we've looked at in virtual reality.
Of course, this isn't the only new place that reviews will be popping up.
Valve is putting curated reviews from creators you follow atop pages for tags and genres. If your favorite creators produce video content, that will now be embedded within reviews, allowing you to see clips from YouTube and other top global video platforms without leaving the Steam store.
If you don't know who to follow, Valve has made that easier as well by allowing curators to link their existing social media presence to their curator page. If you follow us on Twitter or Twitch already, it will be even easier to follow us on Steam and see our reviews during your next Steam sale binge.
Behind the scenes, we've also found Valve's new system to be a big step up from the previous implementation.
Steam's curator update allows us to customize our landing page and present our content to readers in an inviting way, and it's another great step back towards Steam's golden days of a few years ago. Valve has worked with outlets in the beta extensively, and we've seen improvements to the back-end tools come about due to our direct feedback.
It's not perfect, as we'd really still love to see a rating between "Recommended" and "Not Recommended" on their scale, but I can't see much reason to complain with what is here.
As the system rolls out to more users, Valve will be switching on the "Curator Connect" program, which will allow developers to send review copies of games directly to outlets like us through Steam. We weren't able to test this facet of the update, but the system that Valve has described to us will support key features such as sending games to multiple authors from the page. I personally have high hopes that this system will allow sites like ours to better cover the wide array of games big and small that come onto Steam every month.
