Valve: 1.3M people follow Steam Curators, revenue grows by 18% for more obscure games

Smaller games are making more money on Steam, and Valve thinks it’s because of its recent Discovery Update.

Last night, Valve released a report to its SteamworksDev group (via Reddit) that details the effects of the changes the company made to how its Steam digital-distribution portal works. In September, the company updated Steam to improve game discovery. This involved an algorithm that provided every gamer with their own personalized “Discovery Queue.” It also included the introduction of Steam Curators, who are people who Steam customers can follow and get recommendations from. These changes were important to developers because no other online store even comes close to accounting for Steam’s volume of PC sales, but every week more games clutter that market. And the people making software for PC were starting to feel like they were getting drowned out in the $25 billion computer-gaming market.