Over the years,Valvehas managed to grow Steam into one of the most ubiquitous gaming platforms on the market, going so far as to have been effectively synonymous with PC gaming at one point in time. The development of Steam doesn’t ever really stop, of course, and the company is always working on new features and marketing advances for future implementations.
One ofValve’s latest Steam-related projects is a special game recommendation patent, suggesting a potentially innovative way to expose users to games that they might end up liking in the end. What makes the patent particularly interesting is that it might be used to generate custom video compilations for the end-user.
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Valve’s early success as a companyrelies mainly on Steam making it easy for gamers worldwide to not only access their game libraries from one place but also to discover entirely new titles that they might not have even heard about. The new patent effectively represents an expansion of this principle, in that it seems like it would analyze a gamer’s preferences and generate a custom compilation of video materials from games that they might enjoy playing.
While the specific execution of the patent remains to be seen, it seems to be an extension ofValve’s quality-of-life improvement policy for Steam, as the goal’s always been to give gamers ready access to their entire game library, as well as to tell them about products they might consider buying. To that end, the patent references the generation and training of detailed machine-learning models that would provide gamers with customized compilation videos from games that correlate with their consumption history.
Withover 2,500 playable games on Steam Deck, it’s likely that Valve is using this patent as the basis of a unified game recommendation system that would make it easier for Steam Deck users to find games that they might’ve otherwise missed, as it’s difficult for players to parse through so many titles already. Naturally, the same principle would apply to regular Steam users as well, and by bolstering game discovery, Valve might end up getting more people to buy more games than they otherwise would have been interested in.
While it’s still early days for Valve’s handheld gaming PC, statistics suggest thatSteam Deck may have boosted Linux gamingby a fair margin. The company’s work on a new and improved game discovery algorithm might look inconsequential compared to Valve’s strides in supporting non-Windows gaming, but custom compilation videos may well end up being key for exposing the more casual gamers and new Steam adopters to niche titles in the end.
