Valve has added new Detection characteristics to Steam for studios to implement. These changes, according to Valve, were made based on explicit feedback provided by developers, some during Gamescom in early August.
Both changes give studios control over which related elements appear on a title’s store page. They can now choose which studio, franchise, or publisher to highlight under a written description.
For example, PlayStation might decide to put Shadows of Assassin's Creed in the “More like this” tab below Ghost of TsushimaOn the contrary, Ubisoft could do the same with God of War (2018) For Assassin's Creed Valhalla.
This is the latest (and final) set of changes made to Steam for August. Over the past month, the storefront has seen changes to its Shop Page Descriptions, player reviewsand whether a reviewed game was played primarily on computer or Steam bridge.
According to Valve, this discoverability change “specifies the set of games to draw from, as well as the sort order for those games, and sets one or more included games to forcibly appear at the top of the list.”
In the Store Editor's “special settings” tab, developers can choose what makes sense for that particular game. However, Valve has emphasized that a developer (or publisher, or franchise) must first have a specific page set up before this can be set up.
After locking related titles, studios can choose the sort order (top sellers, price, relevance, etc.) or manually override the sort order and move specific games into the set. Manually placed games will appear before others.
The second change allows developers to highlight a DLC item “more broadly.” With this change, it is now possible to highlight a game's most recent (or most notable) DLC release, or an upcoming post-launch item (like an expansion) to grab players' attention.
Similar to the related tab for full games, developers simply need to go to the “special settings” tab of the Store Editor and select “DLC”.
There are pre-selected reasons to choose from, such as “new” or “upcoming” DLC. Valve has stated that they are open to developer suggestions for other DLC requests to implement in the future.
For more information on the changes made to the Steam store page, please read Here.