How do Gamers Rise Up? The Art of Finding the Games.
Steam is one of the most popular video game distribution platforms by the company, Valve. It can be described as the Netflix of video games. Gamers can easily browse through the tens of thousands of games available for any variety of prices. Steam profits largely on gamers buying a game, therefore they make marketing of games to players a huge priority in their system. To do this, they could use information cascades on the popularity and the familiarity of the game to their audiences. To properly recommend a game, one must understand the ideas behind “popularity” and “familiarity”.
Popularity is done in Steam through both community recommendations of the public and the review system. Steam is interesting because it does not do ratings based on numerical values, it only treats things as overwhelmingly positive, very positive, positive, neutral, negative, very negative. Therefore, this allows people to see what games are popular in the community and steam will spread this information around which will entice people to buy them.
Regarding familiarity, people are more likely to buy things if they are familiar with the people who play the game, games like the game you want to buy, or if the genre of the game is similar. Steam, therefore, uses these metrics to help associate players with games they could play. For some games, it shows whether your friends want or own the game, and it uses that to help you decide on whether to get the game.
This image from Steam describes some of the games from my personal recommendations, where it said because I played a certain game or genre, it would recommend me some new titles based on the information I had on my preferences.
Overall, Steam uses multiple factors and multiple layers of information to help recommend and drive people to buy different games. This is an information cascade from the popularity system described as well as the familiarity system through Steam’s knowledge of your preferences and Steam friends. Together, this allows gamers to rise up and buy more video games.
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All images taken above are from Steam.