The Steam store relies primarily on algorithms to bring you fresh games you might be interested in, but there are always holes in machine-driven recommendation systems. Valve has just plugged one of those holes, however – you can now let Steam know when you’re ignoring a game because you’ve already played it on another platform.
When you load up a game on the Steam store, you’ll find a new drop down menu next to the usual ignore button. There, you’ll find a checkbox for ‘played on another platform.’ That’ll pull the game from your recommendations, but it will still be used to recommend other games on the store to you.
“The plan is to feed the new ‘played on other platforms’ data into new recommendation engines,” Valve’s Alden Kroll says on Twitter. That includes new Steam Labs features, like the Interactive Recommender. It looks like Valve is expanding its offbeat new recommendation features at a pretty rapid pace.
If you’re a stickler for details, you can track down any previously ignored games from your Steam account, but Kroll says “you shouldn’t feel compelled to go back and change the state on all those games.”
This also conveniently gives Valve a bit of extra data on which games you’re choosing not to play on Steam – though exactly how (or if) that info will be used remains to be seen.