Skip to main content

You can now tell Steam you already played a game on another store

Steam's new feature.
Steam's new feature.
Image Credit: GamesBeat
@jeffgrubb

I like to play indie games on my Switch, and when I do, I don’t need Steam telling me about them on PC. Up until this point, my only option for hiding these recommendations was to click “ignore.” But that would eliminate them from consideration in Steam’s suggestion algorithms. But now, you can tell Steam that you already played the game on another platform when you hit the ignore button.

“Games are fun, and you should play them wherever you prefer,” Valve business developer Tom Giardino wrote in a post on Twitter. “Thanks to a recent update, you can tell Steam that you already played a game somewhere else. That way, we won’t waste time suggesting it to you, but it can still help guide future recommendations.”

This is part of Valve’s ongoing efforts to improve discoverability on its game-distribution platform. Steam is the largest portal for selling games on PC, but it also has thousands of releases to choose from. This can make finding games you may like feel overwhelming.

June 5th: The AI Audit in NYC

Join us next week in NYC to engage with top executive leaders, delving into strategies for auditing AI models to ensure fairness, optimal performance, and ethical compliance across diverse organizations. Secure your attendance for this exclusive invite-only event.

To address this problem, Valve has put a lot of work into algorithms to suggest games based on what games you play and how long you play them. But if you split your time between various platforms, it’s likely that Steam doesn’t have a full picture of who you are.

For example, I played Dead Cells on Switch for 100 hours. Steam doesn’t know about that. Now, I can tell it that I played it elsewhere. And if you’ve ignored games in the past, you can go back and update to say that you played them on another store.

“But you shouldn’t feel compelled to go back and change the state on all those games,” Valve business developer Alden Kroll wrote on Twitter. “The plan is to feed the new ‘played on other platforms’ data into new recommendation engines such as [the Interactive Recommender].”