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Improbable Lobster posted:Doesn't make it good, doesn't remove the value of curation The Epic Games Store has curation and I'm not seeing much value. I used to argue for curation, but honestly there's more interesting games arriving on Steam than there used to be. It sucks that they often don't get the audience they deserve (play The Void Rains Upon Her Heart) but most would never have been sold on Steam under the old regime. The one thing that curation undoubtedly does is foster a more competitive marketplace as games makers have to make their own stores to sell games rejected by the curated market or other marketplaces spring up to take advantage of the blind spots that curation brings with it.
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Jul 26, 2022 21:10
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Creation, done well, requires good curators. A good curator selects from the archives a collection of things that go together to tell a compelling story, fill out a missing piece, address a current interest or need, etc. At my company we use curation to highlight collections of individual documents that we think will pique customers' interests but which they would be unlikely to discover (individually or especially collectively) on their own. But curation done badly is just noise, more stuff being shoved at you that you don't care about and getting in the way of just going to the thing you want in the first place. Like any tool, it can be used inappropriately and cause more harm than good.
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Jul 26, 2022 21:26
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I don't really trust a storefront to decide for me what is "trash", so I'm skeptical of quality curation at the acceptance level, just as I am about it on Steam. Curation after things have been already been accepted to the storefront can be very useful though. Something like Steam's user curation tools for DTRPG would be nice. Itch kind of has it by letting you make public collections.
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Jul 26, 2022 21:32
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CitizenKeen posted:I just wanted to find a game on DriveThru, and I couldn't find a search button (don't @ me), so I just searched on DDG for "drivethru [game]". I don't know who is browsing through DriveThru, etc., except to find other games by the same publisher, etc. This is not to @ you but provide the information for any concerned parties: here are my desktop and mobile versions of the drivethru site, with some highlights. I regularly search for various indie releases on DTRpg and where to go is kind of a matter of muscle memory for me at this point. (Eyeball memory?)  
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Jul 26, 2022 22:13
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fez_machine posted:The vast majority of people do not want to spontaneously discover new games on Steam. Most people only buy one or two games a year (or less) based on marketing/word of mouth. The rest buy more games based on those two factors, and then there's a tiny sliver that buy through browsing the shop. Steam gains almost nothing from catering to that last percentage. What? According to this, The average millenial spends around 90/month on average on video games. Where did you get these numbers? I'm very curious.
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Jul 26, 2022 22:15
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That says they surveyed 1000 "gamers" and that specific audience spends $76/mo (millenials surveyed spend $86). That is not the same as surveying all millennials to find out what they spend, and it also doesn't tell you the spend of the average Steam account. The survey's own results also make this highly dubious conflation, starting with the description of the surveyed audience as "gamers" and then says "We calculated exactly how much each generation of Americans will spend on gaming assuming they begin paying for their own gaming expenses at 16 years old," which assumes "gamers" can be genericised into "Americans" and also assumes that people who spend a lot today won't spend less or more in the future, another unsupported assumption. It further makes the extremely bad calculation of assuming if gamers didn't spend this money on gaming, they'd put it into retirement savings, and calculate a backwards-looking rate of return to show how much it'd add up to in retirement. Of course, I'm sure they didn't ask the respondents how much they're already saving for retirement, or perhaps calculate how much the average "golf enthusiast" spends on golfing and then show how much golfers are loving their retirement accounts either. And there's this rather telling statement, too: "The highest percentage of respondents spend between $1 - $30 on gaming each month (22.30%) followed by $121-150 (18.10%). By comparison, roughly 1 in 4 respondents said they spend only $20 - $35 on health and fitness (including gym memberships) each month. The second highest percentage of respondents (21%) don’t spend any money on health and fitness." So they're not calculating what the average gamer spends, they're calculating the average amount spent across the whole population, which isn't the same thing. To put it more briefly, while I think fez_machine probably pulled "one or two games a year" out of their rear end, the survey you linked is extremely dubious poo poo you should give no credence to. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Jul 26, 2022 |
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Jul 26, 2022 22:22
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Leperflesh posted:That says they surveyed 1000 "gamers" and that specific audience spends $76/mo (millenials surveyed spend $86). That is not the same as surveying all millennials to find out what they spend, and it also doesn't tell you the spend of the average Steam account. Alright fair enough
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Jul 26, 2022 22:27
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Oh the spend also included hardware and peripherals, so for PC gamers that includes the actual cost of the computer, lol.
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Jul 26, 2022 22:34
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card kingdom employees voted 111-16 for the union
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Jul 27, 2022 00:23
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Hell yeah, that's great news.
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Jul 27, 2022 00:23
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Leperflesh posted:To put it more briefly, while I think fez_machine probably pulled "one or two games a year" out of their rear end, the survey you linked is extremely dubious poo poo you should give no credence to. Leperflesh posted:Oh the spend also included hardware and peripherals, so for PC gamers that includes the actual cost of the computer, lol. I did pull one or two games out of my rear end (it's based on completely anecdotal evidence and assumptions). However, there also many many ways to spend lots of money within a relatively select few games without going searching for a new game to play so absolute spend is not an indicator of a desire for new product.
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Jul 27, 2022 00:30
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Does Steam not use your activity to generate recommendations? Like "hey you spent 600 hours in Mass Effect, did you want to try the sequel" isn't a thing they do?
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Jul 27, 2022 00:54
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moths posted:Does Steam not use your activity to generate recommendations? Like "hey you spent 600 hours in Mass Effect, did you want to try the sequel" isn't a thing they do? It does, but realize that when it comes to recommendation engines, Facebook and Google's "You just bought a mattress? Let us show you advertisements for mattresses." is the state of the art. Steam's recommendations are either painfully obvious ("You like GTA 3? Have you considered GTA 4?") or terrible ("You like Final Fantasy games? Have you considered interactive erotic novellas? They're anime, too!")
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Jul 27, 2022 00:57
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Oh, oh no. I remember being legit impressed by Amazon's recommendations back when they were mostly books.
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Jul 27, 2022 01:45
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CitizenKeen posted:It does, but realize that when it comes to recommendation engines, Facebook and Google's "You just bought a mattress? Let us show you advertisements for mattresses." is the state of the art. Steam's recommendations are either painfully obvious ("You like GTA 3? Have you considered GTA 4?") or terrible ("You like Final Fantasy games? Have you considered interactive erotic novellas? They're anime, too!") "Oh, you like Dungeon Keeper? Would you like to check out Assassin's Creed: Valhalla?" 
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Jul 27, 2022 01:47
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Wait, Spotify actually makes some really great recommendations - That should be possible for Steam, right?
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Jul 27, 2022 01:51
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Spotify has the advantage of tons more data because you don’t have to pay per song.
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Jul 27, 2022 02:11
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Also, Steam has very little incentive to be better, they make tins of money without it. Spotify wants you to keep listening continuously.
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Jul 27, 2022 03:00
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Pattern recognition is still a work in progress
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Jul 27, 2022 03:06
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Also, Spotify still has a bunch of weird oddities where everyone gets recommended something like a random Pavement b-side because the algorithm gets weird and think that fits with everyone's playlists. It's just that no one complains casually about that, because it's a pretty good song and the bar it needs to clear is "will you spend the next three minutes listening to this in the background".
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Jul 27, 2022 03:29
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Or me two months ago: I got recommended Warriors Orochi because I played Grim Dawn
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Jul 27, 2022 03:59
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moths posted:Wait, Spotify actually makes some really great recommendations - That should be possible for Steam, right? Think about your success rate buying a nice present for a friend. Now imagine explaining your thought process to someone else. Now imagine trying to train a cat to do it. Now imagine trying to make a breeding program to train cats to buy a present for your friend. "If you like X and Y, will you like Z" is an incredibly complicated problem and we're nowhere near solving it ; we're still deep in the steps of just throwing absolute poo poo tons of data at the problem and hoping computers solve it themselves.
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Jul 27, 2022 04:22
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Steam has all but given up on curating because curating is better served by other media. There's probably some group of people who legit followed some Steam recompenses, but they are far outweighed by people buying games based on twitch streamers, you tube personalities, or probably other media formats I don't know about. Curation happens even without platform specific support, and Steam has kind of given up. The most powerful TG curation is probably Shut Up and Sit Down on the board game side but I don't know if there is a real RPG curation engine that's really suitable for RPGs. It might be too personal of an activity for the same kinds of meta-mechanisms to naturally evolve and generic reviews won't properly curate appropriate niche products. They'll just tell me that Curse of Strahd is a better received product by most audiences than Rise of Tiamat, which I would have guessed by the fancy reprint on prominent display anyway. Edit: RPGs lack the kind of data necessary to really guide purchases. If you buy 10 things a month and 10000 people like you do to, I can take that information and maybe suggest the right 11th thing. TG stuff tends to be you buy one thing every other month and only 1/5 of the average group is buying those things and there's only 200 of you. Meaningful statistics are just harder to pull out I think. piL fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Jul 27, 2022 |
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Jul 27, 2022 04:25
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Lurks With Wolves posted:Also, Spotify still has a bunch of weird oddities where everyone gets recommended something like a random Pavement b-side because the algorithm gets weird and think that fits with everyone's playlists. It's just that no one complains casually about that, because it's a pretty good song and the bar it needs to clear is "will you spend the next three minutes listening to this in the background". This is literally how Plastic Love happened.
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Jul 27, 2022 04:55
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Qoey posted:I got recommended Warriors Orochi because I played Grim Dawn I mean... Both games are great if you just want to mow down a ton of dudes. It's like the same level as "both these songs have a guitar in them" for music recommendations.
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Jul 27, 2022 05:15
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moths posted:Oh, oh no. I remember being legit impressed by Amazon's recommendations back when they were mostly books. Recommendations have gotten so much worse everywhere, it's hilarious how bad these company's algorithmic poo poo is while they put all of their eggs in that basket
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Jul 27, 2022 13:07
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moths posted:Wait, Spotify actually makes some really great recommendations - That should be possible for Steam, right? Spotify invested very heavily in recommendations. In 2014 they bought The Echo Nest, which was an MIT spinoff dedicated to music data analysis, including recommendations. That got them a bunch of obsessive music+data nerds, including this guy. (His blog is dense but great.) So the magic formula is “buy a niche company full of really smart people who care about recommendation engines and whatever you’re selling,” which is hard to reproduce.
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Jul 27, 2022 14:02
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I bought a replacement car charging cable for my phone and according to Amazon this meant I wanted to buy floor mats for Teslas and toilet seat covers.
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Jul 27, 2022 14:08
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Amazon recs for books were just fine, then they removed the ''also bought" section of recommendations in my region.
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Jul 27, 2022 14:20
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Toilet seat covers are very nice.
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Jul 27, 2022 14:22
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I think it's also difficult for RPGs because it tends to be based around group preferences rather than individual preferences. Most pure sales platforms such as DTRPG don't have any idea of who is in a group with whom - although Roll20 could.
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Jul 27, 2022 14:33
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Thanlis posted:Spotify invested very heavily in recommendations. In 2014 they bought The Echo Nest, which was an MIT spinoff dedicated to music data analysis, including recommendations. That got them a bunch of obsessive music+data nerds, including this guy. (His blog is dense but great.) Wow, are these the geniuses that made sure that after a week-long listening binge of almost exclusively more-or-less obscure british 1970's bands, my recommendations were suddenly full of Tuvan throat singing and C-tier Farsi rappers? Incredible.
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Jul 27, 2022 14:41
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Xiahou Dun posted:Think about your success rate buying a nice present for a friend. Yeah it's essentially a scam but so is all online advertising
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Jul 27, 2022 14:46
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That's probably my fault. I made a Freakbeat playlist and immediately moved on to Mongolian metal.
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Jul 27, 2022 14:47
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Halloween Jack posted:That's probably my fault. I made a Freakbeat playlist and immediately moved on to Mongolian metal. Throatsinging George is an outlier and should be ignored.
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Jul 27, 2022 14:50
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Comrade Koba posted:Wow, are these the geniuses that made sure that after a week-long listening binge of almost exclusively more-or-less obscure british 1970's bands, my recommendations were suddenly full of Tuvan throat singing and C-tier Farsi rappers? Incredible. I don't see anything incorrect or problematic with this.
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Jul 27, 2022 14:51
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Halloween Jack posted:That's probably my fault. I made a Freakbeat playlist and immediately moved on to Mongolian metal. Still sad about Tengger Cavalry.
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Jul 27, 2022 14:52
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It's important to remember that while the megacorporations have unprecedented power to surveil us, their ability to actually predict and control outcomes using that information is spotty at best. This isn't discussed because online marketing/advertising is insanely overvalued quackery and it's important to keep it that way.
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Jul 27, 2022 15:02
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People's tastes aren't really that nebulous or unfathomable though. You only need to suggest the correct one (out of maybe three) new game in a genre to have a winning success rate. You're not picking out something that matches a person's tastes, you're finding where that person fits within documented and predictable data.
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Jul 27, 2022 15:29
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With me Amazon likes to play "would you like more Transformers" (which is valid) or "how many toaster ovens do you need?"
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Jul 27, 2022 16:04
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