Valve has fixed a Steam bug that hurt indie sales, but the damage is still being done

Earlier this week, a number of indie developers noted that a change to Steam’s discoverability algorithm has led to lower store traffic and reduced sales - as low as half of previous averages. That bug was introduced to the store in October, and while it was fixed just a week later, those figures still haven’t recovered. The bug saw Steam recommending big, popular games to the exclusion of smaller ones that might be more relevant to individual players’ tastes, but that’s only part of the story. The issue came alongside an update to the discovery algorithm, but intentional changes to that algorithm have also led to continued reduced sales for certain titles. If that all sounds vague, it’s because Valve’s intentionally leaving out the details of how its algorithm works. As the company told indie dev Jake Birkett today, the intention is to keep the details of the algorithm secret so that it can’t be easily manipulated. The ultimate goal is to help players see the games that are most relevant to them, but there’s little denying that specific games have been very directly hurt by the changes.

from PCGamesN https://ift.tt/2QFTvoi