Steam store = drowning in a sea of mediocre games

[Zeke45]

Steam's own search filters cannot even sort out this mess.

Also, other "tools" such as the cross-referencing are a joke -- for example "games like this." Imagine my surprise when I learned that Control is like Call of Duty, and that Mass Effect is like Baldur's Gate 3.

And what does Baldur's Gate 3 show in the "games like this"? You'd think Dragon Age or maybe Pathfinder or maybe Pillars of Eternity? Nope, none of those. But it does suggest For Honor, and Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2.

Cataloging and categorizing at its finest.

And still, oftentimes, if you click the developer link on a game's page, you're instead given the publisher. It's pasted together with chewing gum.

[Tito Shivan]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Purple:

GOG does a better job at this, massively better. For example, I have Plague Tale Requiem on GOG, and GOG recommended "Shadwen" and "Silence" as similar games. I bought both of them and did find that they are appropriate recommendations based on Plague Tale.

The less volume of items, the better you can manually curate relations between them. GOG's library is orders of magnitude smaller than Steam.

[the grinch wetbandit]

Thats the reason curated is the way to go. Steam is a cesspool of trash.

[Placenta Salad]

I seldom use the actual Steam storefront for finding/purchasing video games except maybe during their seasonal sale events or to occasionally look and see what people are buying in the "top sellers" section.

Instead, I mostly use other websites like Steam250 or SteamDB's sales, charts, and "find games" webpages, where you can find games through SteamDB using the same search parameters on Steam except you can search for multiple tags way easier between genre, price tag, ratings, etc.

Steam's store has way too many big buttons flashing in your face and the UI is visually clustered.

[Mailer]

If you don't think the default recommended options are up to snuff, then I would recommend that you give Steam's Interactive Recommender a try. You can cater its results to whatever games you want provided they are among your most played ones:
https://store.steampowered.com/recommender/

Also, as Salad says above, there are also other tools beyond Steam at your disposal like SteamDB; especially during a sale, I cannot recommend it enough.

[Jiffypop]

Well, the definition of mediocre game changes from player to player. Steam has a WIDE variety of games, which I think is far better than what Nintendo does. Steam's bar for entry is far lower too, which allows a lot of games that probably wouldn't have gotten a chance otherwise to put their work out there. Of course, this causes some slop to come in, but hey if those dudes wanna drop $100 to deliver slop then so be it.