20 PCWorld AUGUST 2019NEWS
IMAGE: VALVEValve’s intriguing ‘Steam Labs’
experiments help you find new
games in a sea of releases
Gabe Newell, the Science Guy. BY HAYDEN DINGMANS
team is enormous, and growing
more so by the day. And that
presents a problem: How the hell
do you find anything that isn’t
already on your radar? It’s less a needle in a
haystack, more a needle in a hayfield—and
that’s after Valve tried to solve the problem
once already, with 2014’s Discovery Update
(go.pcworld.com/14up).
Five years later, it’s time to try again.
This time, Valve’s approach is a bit moreadvanced—and a bit more scattershot. Under
the umbrella of Steam Labs (go.pcworld.
com/labs), Valve’s rolling out three new
experiments that should hopefully
streamline the discovery process and help
you find the odd diamond among Steam’s
30,000 game library.GOGGLES ON
“Behind the scenes at Steam, we create many
experimental features with codenames like