
After a year of testing, one of Steam’s best features is finally out of beta, making it easier to find games you might actually like.
Steam’s Personal Calendar, a feature Valve has been testing for almost a year, has finally come out of beta and is now available to everyone.
Personal Calendar, originally launched as a Steam Labs experience last October, works by highlighting upcoming games and recent releases – tailored to your interests – and organizing them by release date. The feature has its own section on the store’s homepage, as well as a dedicated page showing games that Steam’s algorithm thinks you’ll like, meaning what’s included is different for everyone.
While Steam has always had multiple ways to recommend games to players based on their tastes, Personal Calendar takes it a step further by having stricter recommendation criteria and organizing the results in an intuitive, month-based way that’s less likely to get overwhelmed.
Valve says its recommendation engine relies on three key metrics: it looks at your recently played games, finds other players with similar gaming profiles, and then reviews the games. those players played or added to their wishlist. In a blog post, Valve explains that only games “you play the most” are considered, meaning that titles you try for a few minutes won’t count toward your recommendations.
Importantly, Personal Calendar recommendations are not static and Valve notes that they are refreshed daily to incorporate new data as it becomes available. “In reality, you probably won’t see your recommendations change much from day to day,” he writes, “but over time you’ll obviously see new things pop up as the calendar’s eight-week horizon advances, or as games lock in their release dates.”
Furthermore, Valve is aware that this feature could end up having the opposite effect, i.e. limiting the number of games a player potentially sees because they fall outside of its filters, essentially trapping them in a bubble. The developer doesn’t have a clear solution to this potential problem, but says they want to keep things varied.
“With the Personal Calendar, it is unlikely that every day a new game will be released that is of the same genre/theme as the games you have played and is also a good recommendation for you,” explains Valve. “As a result, the recommendations generated by Personal Calendar end up drawing on a broader pool of titles from all types of genres that are released every day.”
Gn tech