Steam beta tests Curator changes

Valve is rolling out some long-awaited changes to its Steam Curators program. The company today said it has begun a beta testing period for a variety of new Steam Curator features and tools that were first announced earlier this year.

"Over the three years since introduction of Steam Curators, we've gathered a lot of feedback from all kinds of perspectives," the company said in a blog post. "We've heard from players, from curators, from streamers, from game developers, and from all kinds of other tastemakers and content creators. The feedback is clear that the system needs to do a bunch of things better in order to work well for the three primary sets of people it's trying to serve: players, curators, and game developers."

With the changes, curators will be able to embed video content for the games they curate, and Valve said it already supports YouTube videos as well as nicovideo.jp, youku.com, and bilibili.com. Curators will also be able to personalize their own pages on Steam, have their recommendations show up in more places throughout the site for users who follow them, and create lists of games that could help players discover new titles. Valve gave "best couch co-op games", "games with amazing Workshop support", and "games by my favorite designer" as a few examples of how it expects curators to use the list feature.

As for developers, Valve hopes its new features will streamline interactions between creators and influencers with a "Curator Connect" system. The system lets developers search the list of curators to find those who specialize in a game's genre, platform, language, or the like. They will also be able to check out how many followers the curator has and on which social media accounts, and build a list of curators they can offer a free copy of their game to. The system eliminates the need for Steam keys, as the curators can simply choose to accept or decline any offered game and it will be added to their Steam library automatically.

Valve is rolling out these changes in a closed beta group of "a few dozen" curators, and hopes to widen access in the coming weeks.