Steam Labs is celebrating its first anniversary today, with Valve’s experimental software lab promising all sorts of new, even wackier projects are on their as part of year-two plans.
In the meantime, the newest feature that started as a Steam Labs experiment, Community Recommendations, is making its way to all Steam users as of today. Steam Labs proved their worth in a relatively short timeframe, though it’s not like many doubted the usefulness of an opt-in, semi-open and permanent beta program from the standpoint of a humongous software ecosystem with tens of millions of loyal, active, and tech-savvy users.
Yeah, must feel good to be Valve. Besides Community Recommendations, this program previously yielded a standalone Interactive Recommendations algorithm, as well as Steam’s current repertoire of advenced search tools, and Play Next Suggestions.
Meanwhile, The Automated Show is one experiment that didn’t make it to launch following negative community feedback, much like Deep Dive, a cool-sounding feature allowing you to browse the Steam Store using any game as its entry point.
Unfortunately, the execution was subpar and resulted in gimmicky, samey results that didn’t warrant a separate Steam client feature launch. But here’s to hoping the second year of Steam Labs ends up being even more fruitful!