Valve responded to indie developers who complained about declining sales due to falling traffic from their games on Steam.
In recent days, the company has been accused of supporting AAA developers and called a “traitor to indie studios.” But today a post appeared in the Steam community where the company explained what caused the loss of indie games traffic.
“On October 5, we implemented a new code in Steam that changed the default values in the search engine so that popular games and games from the wishlist were given greater priority. Thus, we wanted to eliminate the problem when the game we were looking for in the search results turned out to be much lower than other games that are not so interesting to the user.
This change entailed an unforeseen side effect in the form of deactivation of tags in the “Similar products” section on the game store page. Instead of showing the player similar products, the system selected games by just one tag from among the most popular projects on Steam. We didn’t want this feature to work that way.
On October 9, we changed the algorithm for the “Similar products” section to search for similar tags. However, we also kept some of the new code that took into account the best-selling games and the wish list. On October 30, we raised the priority of tags again, based on the results we saw.
From October 10 to 17, we experimented with the “Similar Products” section, testing a new search algorithm that we hoped would select interesting games more efficiently. Because of this experiment, users saw fewer games in the search, which led to a decrease in traffic.
As a result, the total number of impressions and views in the “Similar Products” section turned out to be significantly lower two weeks after the initial changes in the algorithm. But on October 19, traffic recovered and the situation stabilized.
We usually try to show players the games that we think they will like – and it doesn’t matter who created them, what their budget is, when they came out, etc. We are constantly trying new ideas and experimenting to figure out how to improve the search. And the fact is that traffic changes every time: it can rise or fall for any product. In the end, the most important thing for us is to show users the games they are interested in.”
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