Steam Officially Rolls Out A Calendar Feature To Directly Recommend New Games

Steam has unveiled a new Personal Calendar feature designed to directly suggest new or soon-to-be-released games to its users. This addition to the platform's arsenal of recommendation tools is expected to influence how games are discovered in the future. The Personal Calendar has been under testing in Steam Labs throughout the previous year. It can be accessed either as a widget on the Steam store's homepage or through a separate dedicated page.

The calendar displays games that may pique your interest based on their release dates. Users have the flexibility to customize their viewing experience by filtering the displayed games according to aspects such as game tags, early access status, and whether the game is on their wishlist. The primary objective of the Personal Calendar is to provide users with a concise overview of games released within the past month or slated for release within the next month that Steam believes might interest them.

According to a blog post, the Personal Calendar will update daily and relies on your recent gaming history to identify individuals with comparable playtime profiles. It then examines the games these players have added to their wishlist or are currently playing. While the recommendations are not hand-curated, Valve emphasizes that developers cannot purchase placement on the Personal Calendar. Consequently, an algorithm determines the featured games, which is likely to impact game discoverability.

Upon exploring the Personal Calendar on my own Steam account, I encountered both well-known upcoming games like Emberville and Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered. These games would likely have been suggested by Steam's existing features. However, the Personal Calendar also recommended some lesser-known games like Sulfur, an Early Access-exiting title, which I had not previously encountered.

Although I am quite familiar with upcoming game releases, the Personal Calendar demonstrated a more targeted and specific curation compared to Steam's Popular New Releases and Popular Upcoming tabs. It remains to be seen how widely users will adopt this new feature.