Valve is finally taking its Personal Calendar feature on Steam out of beta, allowing all users to access a personalised game recommendations page based on the titles they play.
As announced via a news post on Steam, the Personal Calendar feature was initially launched last year as a Steam Labs experiment, and works by spotlighting upcoming or recent game releases that might appeal to a user’s interests based on the titles they play. Now that the feature has been made public, users can access a dedicated page on the storefront that features recommendations tailored to them.
To access their Personal Calendars, users must first hover over the “Recommendations” tab on the Store page, where they will see a new button named “Explore My Calendar”. Once accessed, users will see a curated list of up to 500 recommended games (with further options from 5 to 250), alongside further options to narrow down this list by adjusting whether to display their wishlisted games, or hide owned games and those that are releasing only in Early Access.
Since this list is catered to each specific user, everyone’s list will feature different titles, with Valve stating that Personal Calendar will use stricter recommendation criteria and algorithms to determine which game to recommend, with the recommendation engine using a player’s “recently played games to find people with similar playtime profiles to you, and then looks at the games those players have been adding to their wishlist or playing.”
The Personal Calendar will also be refreshed daily, with the recommendation system getting re-trained to incorporate the latest data. “In reality, you aren’t likely to see your recommendations change all that much from day to day,” states Valve. “But as time goes by you will obviously see new things pop up as the eight-week horizon of the calendar marches forward, or as games lock in their release dates.”
According to Valve, this feature is designed to fill in the gaps of what Steam’s storefront currently offers. Its main Store page features only the most popular games, and other similar recommendation pages will show all similar games no matter how old they are, so this new page will offer a middle ground with both popular and niche releases that may be of interest.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
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