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Valve just released a fairly comprehensive "year in review" for Steam that covers everything from the Steam Store, to active users, to a breakdown of users by region, to changes made to the Steam Community, to upcoming changes they're already working on for 2019, and more.
Most of what is discussed in the blog is essentially a recap of what we already talked about at various times in 2018. You're more than welcome to check out the full entry for yourself, but we're going to focus on what Valve is talking about bringing to you in 2019 "and beyond."
Doing this sort of retrospective is useful to us as a team, because it helps us better understand what we've done and where we should go from here. While we feel like we've accomplished a lot in 2018, there's still a ton more work to do, features to build, and hard problems to solve. Here's a sneak peek at a few of the more notable things we plan to ship this year:
- Store Discoverability: We’re working on a new recommendation engine powered by machine-learning, that can match players to games based on their individual tastes. Algorithms are only a part of our discoverability solution, however, so we're building more broadcasting and curating features and are constantly assessing the overall design of the store.
- Steam China: We've partnered with Perfect World to bring Steam onshore into China. We'll reveal more details about this in the coming months.
- Steam Library Update: Some long awaited changes to the Steam Client will ship, including a reworked Steam Library, built on top of the technology we shipped in Steam Chat.
- New Events System: We're upgrading the events system in the Steam Community, enabling you to highlight interesting activities in your games like tournaments, streams, or weekly challenges.
- Steam TV: We're working on expanding Steam TV beyond just broadcasting specific tournaments and special events, in order to support all games.
- Steam Chat: We're going to ship a new Steam Chat mobile app, so you can share your favorite GIFs with your friends while on the go.
- Steam Trust: The technology behind Trusted Matchmaking on CS:GO is getting an upgrade and will become a full Steam feature that will be available to all games. This means you'll have more information that you can use to help determine how likely a player is a cheater or not.
- Steam PC Cafe Program: We are going to officially ship a new PC Cafe Program so that players can have a good experience using Steam in hundreds of thousands of PC Cafes Worldwide.
They used to have a volunteer mod team for the old Steam forums and I know a few of those people moved on to the general community stuff when they introduced the built-in Community into Steam. However, I'm pretty sure they were not allowed to handle anything related to specific game forums or really anything outside of general Steam discussion stuff. I am just surprised it took them this long to hire a dedicated team for that sort of thing. It was long overdue.