Valve tries its best to provide us with recommendations about the games we might be interested in during the holiday season.

Steam‘s approach is significantly different when it comes to the end of the year than its direct competitor, the Epic Games Store. (We’d like to mention here that the leak about the list of daily freebies that we previously discussed was correct so far, including the repeat giveaways of Inside and Metro 2033 Redux.) While the EGS offers a free game each day until December 31 with coupons to spend, Steam goes for discounts, as well as other experiments to stay relevant to the players.

An example of it would be the new Steam Labs experiment called Faceted Browsing. It provides you with more granular control over what you see in the Winter Sale. It’s similar to Steam’s broader search function, but it’s a bit simplified, allowing you to find deals more selectively than before. You can give a few search terms that you are interested in. For example, if you want to look for a funny first-person RPG title, Gabe Newell’s digital store will recommend the Borderlands games.

There are also themed pages in the Winter Sale, which breaks down the software on sale into categories. We intentionally said software: you can find software there, not just games (there’s a category for it), but there are other subpages, such as RPGs, shooters, or even more strict terms like Anime, Soundtracks, Female Protagonist, or Retro to name a few. „We found these themed pages drove more game store page visits during the sale than all but one other Steam store point of discovery,” Valve said after the Autumn Sale, so they brought this function back with more options.

So if you got some cash for Christmas, you can spend it easier on Steam with these searching helpers.

Source: PCGamer