Steam Officially Launches Calendar Feature to Recommend New Games Directly

Steam’s newest update introduces another way for the platform to point players toward new and soon-to-launch games. The Personal Calendar feature is likely to reshape how games get discovered from here on.

What Is Steam’s Personal Calendar Feature?

Personal Calendar has been in Steam Labs testing since last year. It works as both a widget on the Steam store’s front page and a standalone page. It highlights games you might enjoy, organized by release date. Users can narrow the results by game tags, Early Access status, and whether a title is on their wishlist. The aim is to give you a quick view of games that came out in the past month, or that will launch in the coming month, and that Steam thinks suit your tastes.

A blog post explains that the calendar refreshes every day. It “uses your recently played games to find people with similar playtime profiles to you,” then checks which games those players have wishlisted or been playing. The recommendations aren’t hand-picked, and Valve says developers can’t pay for a spot. An algorithm decides what appears, which is sure to influence how games get discovered.

I spent some time with the Personal Calendar page on my own Steam account. It surfaced a few well-known upcoming releases, such as Emberville and Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered. Steam’s existing features probably would have shown me those anyway. It also brought a few appealing games I’d never heard of onto my radar, including Sulfur, which is leaving Steam Early Access.

I’m probably not the ideal test case, since I keep close track of what’s releasing each week. Even so, Personal Calendar’s picks already feel far more tailored than what Steam’s Popular New Releases and Popular Upcoming tabs offer at the moment. It will be interesting to see how widely Steam users take to it.