Valve’s New Steam Project “Experiment 008” is Now Live

I was very recently made aware of the fact that a new Steam-related project developed by Valve is now at least partially available. As an aspiring PC gaming connoisseur and Phenixx Gaming’s unofficial “Steam correspondent,” I consider it part of my civic duty to share this announcement and at least a small handful of my initial thoughts on it with you, dear reader.

Valve has published a post detailing this new project and its features within the “Steam Labs” group on the main Steam Community website. This new feature is another entry in the series of what Valve has taken to calling “experiments.” You might be familiar with previous entries in this series, such as “Deep Dive” and the “Interactive Recommender,” both of which I’ll briefly explain in a short while.

The newest of these so-called experiments is designated as the “Play Next” system. As the name might imply, this feature examines every game in your Steam library that you’ve yet to play and offers up to three recommendations at a time in terms of what it thinks you should, well, play next. This system makes those recommendations based partially on the games in your library that you’ve already played. Once the Play Next system takes that information into account, it offers its suggestions because its algorithms think you’ll enjoy the games it mentions.

For example, when I first gave the system a test run before I began writing this article, the first three of my un-played games it recommended to me were The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, Tomb Raider, and Cuphead. The system informed me upon issuing these suggestions that it thought I would enjoy these three games based in part on my time spent playing other, comparable titles in my library.

For instance, I’ve spent quite a bit of time playing games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which helps explain the system’s recommendation of The Witcher III. Additionally, the Play Next system displayed that it suggested Tomb Raider due to my time spent playing the Batman: Arkham franchise, and Cuphead was a result of my time logged in games such as Portal 2 and Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove. I must say, the system’s justifications for its recommendations makes a considerable amount of sense to me based on these examples.

I mentioned earlier that the new Play Next system is the most recent entry in Valve’s series of “Steam experiments,” with such predecessors as the aforementioned “Deep Dive” and “Interactive Recommender” systems. Since Valve states in their blog post that the Play Next mechanic relies on the same “underlying technology” as the latter of these two, allow me to briefly explain what those systems are for clarity’s sake.

You see, both Deep Dive and the Interactive Recommender exist to suggest games you don’t already own that these algorithms think you’ll enjoy based on things like the tags of games you’ve played previously. For example, Steam suggested just a moment ago that I enter My Friend Pedro into the Deep Dive system. Upon doing so, Steam brought forth a list of games I might like based on that title’s tags like “shooter, “violent,” and “great soundtrack.” Among that list of games, for instance, was the upcoming Doom Eternal.

The Interactive Recommender operates in much the same way, except that it has more advanced filters in order to ensure that Steam suggests games in which you’re at least somewhat more likely to be interested. You can, for example, tell Steam that you want it to exclude certain tags in its recommendations, that you want it to exclusively suggest games it deems either more popular or more “niche,” or that you only want to see games that are at least a certain number of years old.

If you’d like to try out Steam’s new Play Next system firsthand, you can access it via the Steam store within either the Steam client itself or the browser-based version of the storefront. To conclude on a personal note, as I often do in articles like this, I must admit that I often feel somewhat ashamed due to the sheer number of games in my Steam library that I’ve yet to so much as acknowledge. If you’re in a similar situation to mine in that context, I can easily see the new Play Next feature helping players like myself make a dent in the untouched portions of our libraries. I look forward to seeing how this feature is received now that it’s live.