Valve's Steam gaming platform is a hallmark in the world of PC gaming, the dominant storefront and a must-have for everyone who wants to play PC games. The platform is known for recapping its seasonal periods' performance, and the Steamworks Winter Recap shares a number of recent successes.
The recap's highlight was the overwhelming performance of Steam's Spring Game festival, generating over 385,000 wishlist additions and nearly 3 Million recorded in online attendance. The Steam Spring Game Festival gave the opportunity to indie titles to still showcase their unique creations in spite of the uncontrollable delays of events, most notably GDC. The festival let developers showcase upcoming and released games with demos that you might see at events for a limited time, as well as highlighting streams and talks about the games along with a number of games on sale The demos were downloaded over 550k times showing that many people checked out those upcoming titles.
The Steamworks recap blog post started off by highlighting the tremendous success the platform's new Steam Soundtracks market experienced over the last period, witnessing a significant increase in the number of listings, reaching over 1,300 with their own section. Of course, certain soundtracks sold better than others, but over 50 games managed to cross the 100,000 copies sold milestone. Human Fall Flat took the lead by a significant margin and reached what the music industry labels as "Gold" with over 500,000 sales, as presumably one of two soundtracks that made over $1m during the period.
Steam introduced two new features to their Labs Experiments section in the Winter, specifically Play Next and the News Hub. The latter acts as a hub for players to keep up with the latest happenings in the gaming world for the titles in their library, while Play Next does its best to recommend you similar games to play either from your library or on Steam based on your last playing session. The News Hub can be easily used by developers to announce community playdates, tease upcoming major updates, and communicate directly with their playerbase.
The improved Search and Interactive Recommender features were fully released to the public following their validation and experimentation period earlier the Winter, both briefly described with their respective functions in the section below:
Search delivers more filters, infinite scrolling and other tools to give users greater controls and options for browsing Steam’s catalog.
Interactive Recommender, a way for users to harness the power of machine learning to discover personalized, interactive recommendations, based on their patterns of play. Along with powerful tag-based filters, the IR allows players to tailor results on the fly, such as selecting from a balance of popular or niche titles, recent or classic titles, to help find the exact games they're in the mood to play.
What soundtrack is your favorite from the gaming world? Did you pick up a few soundtracks during Steam's sales? Let us know your thoughts on Steam's Spring recap in the comments section below.
