Steam Game client quality of life upgrade request.

[TaggedZi]

Steam Game client quality of life upgrade request.

Let me start with, I truly enjoy the Steam platform, but there are some things that make using Steam, especially if you have a lot of games difficult. I did a search and found a few bits and pieces of sort requests, but I have an implementable idea for several features that are associated that would together, result in a significant quality of life upgrade for Steam Client users.

1. The ability to add many "TAGS" to a game. Like hash tags in twitter or tags in wordpress, just a word or list of words associated with a game, can even use the #someGameILike type format cause people are already familiar with that... but doesn't have to be that. These tags would be part of a players game profile and stored locally with the client (Possibly backed up on line? Not a requirement though.) The list would only seen by the game client AND the user who created them. I'm talking about something significantly different than the ability to just add a category. Although categories could easily BE tags. I find the category system to be VERY limiting and not very helpful especially once you start to get a lot of games. If you are searching for a game, and you have 50 other games in the same category it didn't help you find it much, possibly a little... but I still have trouble finding games I know the name and category of some times. I would like to be able to tag things like:
- Category (any category I want)
- MyFriendJoeLikesThisOne
- IDidNotLike
- NSFW
- Favorite
- OnlyOnline
- SinglePlayerOnly
- GreatPhysics (for games like racing games)
- NoBrainPowerNeeded (for days when you just want to veg)
- TooViolent
- WifeHatesSoundTrack
- MustPlay
- RecommendedBySteve
- GreatPlot
- etc....

This is NOT a list of all the tags there should be, the point is the tag should be determined by the users. All of those above are tags I have actually wanted to use. They do not have to be in CamelCase, but as a developer I'm used to it, and people do that already in services like Twitter. But they could be any format that Steam finds easy to implement that people can understand.


2. The ability to "FILTER" by attributes visible to the user that they may care about. Filtering is reducing the available games displayed so a user has fewer choices to sort through. The ability to stack filters would be amazing. Sample filters could be things like filtering by:
- Tag (show me all games with tag <some_tag>)
- Size (Huh, I'm running out of disk space and need to clean up, so show me all games larger than 50gb that I haven't played in over a month)
- Install Date (show me all games I installed last month)
- Time played (show me the games I've never played, i'm in the mood for something new.)
- Last time played (Before or after some date.)
- Number of players supported (Maybe I have a friend over, and looking for multiplayer... this could ALSO be a tag, or maybe I'm sitting in discord with 5 friends and wondering what game we can all play without leaving someone out.)
- Show me all the games with ESRB rating E+10 (or any rating really) (I want to know what games would be appropriate for my kids who are sitting behind me while I play.)

This is not an exclusive list, those are just the one's I personally have actually wanted and the use case that drove them. They do not have to ALL be visible all the time, possibly in an "advanced" search section... just an option.

3. The ability to "SORT" the results of a filter set by a number of criteria, not just the hand full picked for me. Things like:
- Name
- Install date
- Game/Software Size
- Number of friends in common
- Number of friends actively playing
- Time spent in game
- Most recently updated
- Number of unfinished (or finished) achievements
- Price paid (if that can be accessed??? may not be practical... but it is an ask.)
- Popularity (among friends or everyone)
- Average user rating
- My rating (if one is given)

4. The ability to "fuzzy search". Many websites and applications have this feature. The ability to start typing and have anything that matches the search text to display, the more text you type in the search field the more specific the results become. And have the results display in the client window to reflect your tags/filters/and sort.

These requests would require that some meta data about the games be stored on the client machine. Like Tags, install size, etc. etc. However if the data is stored locally, and possibly backed up on line, searching/filtering/sorting should be achievable fairly quickly locally. As a developer I understand the difficulty involved with having stacking filter/sort/search methods, however these have become common place in most modern applications, and I would LOVE to see them in Steam. It would make my life much easier. Some of the requests above would probably involve hitting some API's... the external data sources could be implemented in a phase 2 of the project, with all the local stuff implemented first. (just an idea).

In short, Steam is great, but if you have more than a handful of games it is difficult to find what you are looking for some times. The ability to the following
1. Tag Games (any think I want - within size and rational limits),
2. The ability to Filter the available options with more of the criteria I care about, and
3. The ability to sort what is left over
Would greatly improve my experience. The 4th item is just nice to have with or without the other 3.

Feel free to ask questions or modify the idea. I'm not looking to make money off this, just want a nicer experience with the client and my games.


Cheers.

[Gwarsbane]

1 - All tags are user generated, if you want tags put them on a game and hope others start using them. Don't expect negative tags to stick around, I don't believe Valve allows them. Stuff like Tooviolet and WifeHatesSoundTrack will not be allowed.

Also the tags you suggested mostly mean nothing to the game. The tags are used to describe the game to other users. Having ones like "Favorite" and "Ididnotlike" and "MyFriendJoeLikesThisOne" do not describe the game to people. They describe the game to you.



2. Sorting games like that on the steam sort for the most part. Stuff like "last played" means nothing as people are playing the games all the time. Not all games have ESRB ratings... and those ratings mean nothing anyway. For example they rated a new basketball game as E for everyone, even though it has gambling in it. Their ratings are based only on trailers that are sent to them, not actual game play. Even when trailers for games are released on line that obviously have stuff that should be rated adult, they still don't change the ratings. So ya, the ratings are a joke.

Tags can already be sorted by in the library and store.

Most of the other stuff I doubt you will ever be able to be sorted by.

3. I don't see the point of this.

4. Meh, I personally don't care about this. The store already has "fuzzy search". It starts showing you stuff as you type. New beta has this in the new library.


If you are not part of the beta you might want to give it a try.

[ZeeGee]

I'd like some of the filters from 3. that are not in the Beta, like number of missing achievements or remaining card drops. That would really be helpful.

[cinedine]

1) Already exists in the categorization system.
2) Can be achieved by the categorization system as well (or collections as they will be called with the update). As the update is still in beta and the "dynamic collection" is rather lackluster it might be solved with this soon.
4) "fuzzy search" means finding stuff that is not spelled exactly as your search term. E.g. finding "Call of Duty" when you look for "Cal of Duty". Suggest is already featured on the store and the library will udate with every update event for the input. So already exists.

[TaggedZi]

@cinedine I did not know #4 was already in the platform, I just tried it in my inventory and sure enough works as expected. Thanks that improves things a bit.

[TaggedZi]

After reading, I did decide to try the beta. I didn't know it was out or available. It is definitely a step in the right direction. Still not entirely what I was looking for, but it does seem to have much better filter/sort and display options. It is a great step forward. The end goal of what I wanted was the ability to filter/sort by criteria I personally cared about or crafted. Criteria that is unique to me and my experience, not just a flat list that gets an update once and a while by committy, or some engineer, or an algorithm that thinks it knows what I want.