In Valve’s regular Steam Year in Review blog post, the company talked a great deal about some of the highlights of 2019, and what it’s working on for 2020. Valve said that third-parties often use publicly available Steam data to track performance for individual games and gauge the health of Steam as a whole. This data, however, is limited, and since Valve has access to much more of it, it’s going to be sharing some of it with the rest of us. The developer is planning a series of blog posts where it’s going to share its own analysis of game sales and other metrics on Steam. No specifics about this venture were shared in today’s post, so it’ll be very interesting to see what they reveal.
Elsewhere in the post, Valve revealed that it’s looking to expand its Steam Cafe programme into schools, libraries and VR arcades in 2020. Steam Cafe is a special license that allows managers of these places to run Steam games on their machines without having to setup individual accounts and purchase multiple copies of the same game. The ever-useful SteamVR is due for a big update in 2020. Version 2.0, which currently does not have a release target, will introduce “customer experience improvements.” Likewise, Steam Labs, Valve’s experimental store experiences, will continue in 2020. Some of the features that debuted last year, will also a wider release in 2020. On the subject of the store, Valve will expand on the tweaks made recently to game soundtracks. Having now been decoupled from games, the developer plans to expand the soundtrack section with more features. The often neglected Steam mobile app is getting some love this year, too. Finally, Valve revealed that future Steam sales will incorporate some of the features developed for the 2019 Lunar New Year sale, so expect more mini-games and ways to engage with the sale aside from spending money.
