Steam now features a Personal Calendar that will recommend games to you
The latest Steam update added a new way for it to recommend new or imminently released games to players. This new Personal Calendar feature will likely have an impact on game discoverability going forward.
What is Steam’s Personal Calendar feature?
Personal Calendar has been in Steam Labs testing since last year. Both a widget on the Steam store’s front page and a dedicated page of its own, this calendar spotlights games you may be interested in by release date. Steam users are able to filter what’s shown by game tags, early access status, and whether it’s on their wishlist. It’s ultimately meant to serve as a way to get a quick look at games released within the last month or launching over the next month that Steam thinks you might be interested in.
According to a blog post, Personal Calendar will refresh daily and “uses your recently played games to find people with similar playtime profiles to you, and then looks at the games those players have been adding to their wishlist or playing.” While the Personal Calendar’s recommendations aren’t hand-curated, Valve also says developers can’t buy placement on it. That means an algorithm determines what’s shown, which is bound to affect game discoverability.
I explored that Personal Calendar page on my own Steam account for a bit. It suggested some well-known upcoming games like Emberville and Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered, which Steam’s existing features likely would’ve done anyway. That said, it also put some neat-looking games I hadn’t heard of before, like the Steam Early Access-exiting Sulfur, on my radar.
I may not be the best litmus test for its usefulness, since I’m pretty tuned in to what’s coming out each week. Still, I can already tell that Personal Calendar’s curation feels much more specific than Steam’s Popular New Releases and Popular Upcoming tabs currently are, so it’ll be interesting to see how much Steam users embrace it.
