As many have noted, the Steam store is full of games, with over 20 new releases each day coming out. This has been a trend that has been going upwards for years and took off even further with the Steam Direct change. It's been part of an ongoing move by Valve to get away from curating their store manually, believing that it would be better to let users decide what they want on it, something they attempted more directly with Steam Greenlight and recently reinforced their stance on following some controversy.
The other impact of this is that new releases and tons of other products overlead PC Gaming's main storefront. Long gone are the days when a game could count on occupying the new releases area for a full day, even gone are the times you could count on 6 hours of it. With more and more games coming out, and no sign of it slowing down and Valve restricting itself to taking down only illegal, abusive, and 'troll' games, there was a need for further improvements on the discovery side of Steam.
While Valve has implemented numerous new factors like the Discovery Update (which was successful!) and Curators (you can follow ours here) there is still a lot of room for improvement. This time, Valve turned to the upcoming tab on the store page - often a place full of DLC you didn't care about, hobbyist RPG Maker projects and more. Valve turned to their two favorite concepts here: algorithms and community sourcing. As of now, the old Upcoming tab has been banished from the front page and replaced with Popular Upcoming a tab that is designed to show upcoming game's you are more likely to be interested in. Steam will judge interest in a game through wishlists, pre-purchases, past titles from the creators and create a list based on that.
Of course, the problem remains that this list might show titles you mark as "Not Interested" and DLC for games you don't own. Well, Valve has thought of that and your personal list will exclude those, as well as factor in the preferences you've trained Steam with (possibly through the discovery queue). The updated upcoming releases page takes it further by showing upcoming titles from developers or publishers you follow, games you've wishlisted and other data you've feed into Valve's monster. This page also has a tab for all upcoming releases, meaning those who don't like it being computer and community-driven can get a pure list of releases still, although it does take a couple of clicks to get to where they've now placed it.
What do you think of the Popular Upcoming tab? Do you think this is a good update? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
