Basically, they're going to be using "big data" type stuff to collect massive amounts of info and all the games you play, how long you play them, and whether your friends play them, and use that to create a curated storefront for everyone. Their goal is to make sure you never see a game on the store you won't be interested in. Unless you go looking for it of course.
It does two things if I've got it right - It shows you more relevant games for the most part now, for instance I will see less of those, whatever they're called - games that I don't like and more of the kind that I like - It will make it harder for new games to be discovered because it is a feedback loop. People like a certain game, it is more likely to show up to more people and more people like it and it is even more likely to show up to more people. Games that are 'undiscovered' don't get shown to anyone and will not unless external links direct sufficient volume or a large group of people relatively simultaneously discover them. So, indie games are likely to take a big hit from this, especially the ones that blow all their funding to development and can't afford professional marketing. Becoming discovered and getting in on an uplift current will get harder and harder and niche games can become harder to make as they may get less visibility and be less likely to be recommended. Unless they can somehow manage so that the system recognizes your favored niches and can identify a marginal audience game of the type that you might like and actually promote it to you in which case we could have a system that helps people discover quirky marginal games that they like and allow devs to further specialize in niches instead of focusing on lowest common denominator products.
Well, pure volume is making discovery hard currently, so at least letting some of the worse titles sink may help that. But I also suspect that there is going to be some kind of "tagging" of what games are in terms of genre, features, etc, that help match you heuristically to new games... and that will be the new system for developers to, well, "game".
Definitely would like more Factorio style good games popping up on the front instead of genres I've never ever purchased a single game from or even sometimes clicked. Constantly filling the front with all sorts of games I'll never look.
I wish before they tried to come up with some magic algorithm that knows exactly what game I'm looking for they'd spend a little time making the wishlist not practically useless. As it stands all it serves as is a reminder that I'm interested in a game that I've already rediscovered some other way. You can't sort it by anything actually useful like rating, can't filter it in any way, it doesn't show any info about the game besides its name and logo. All they'd really even have to do is put a "[ X ] On Wishlist" checkbox at the top of their search. If they wanted to make it really fancy they could put a dropdown for my friends' wishlists so I can see if they want anything I'm playing.
They'll get around to improving the website shortly after they finish their work with Half-Life 3, that shouldn't take too long.
"Kinda want, really want, OMFG need". Also i want a way to remove a game from wishlist other then going to that gams store page. If there is already i haven't noticed. Either because i bought the game or lost interest in it.
Gaben did an AMA a month or so ago. Apparently nobody is working on HL3 because "nobody's interested in working on HL3." Gee maybe hire literally anyone on the Internet then, Gabe? That'd be because the link to the page where you can manage your wishlist is on your profile page, at the bottom of the list of recently played games rather than anywhere even remotely sensible. But even armed with that knowledge you probably still won't actually see it unless you noticed that visiting your profile page logged you out, since for whatever reason profiles are on a completely different site from the store.
