I get the impression that "online coop" is a tag it weighs very, very heavily, along with most of the "open world survival craft" subtags. Terraria, Factorio and some other games you can put 1000 hours into while optionally playing with a friend are absolute poison for the algorithm, they share a lot of tags with stuff like Rust and V Rising even though they're not remotely the same game.
Comment on The Knightling Did Everything Right - It Still Struggled to Sell | Beyond the Pixels Podcast
Peffse@lemmy.world 3 days agoI swear 95% of the stuff Steam recommended is reasoned with because it is popular and not because it’s something I would play.
Even when they say it’s related to a library item, it’s not even tangential. Like… Escape the Backrooms is not like Terraria. In any sense. They put that there because Youtubers are selling it.
chameleon@fedia.io 2 days ago
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 days ago
If it’s anything at all like the recommendation algorithm that Netflix popularized, it’s that they have tags in common (maybe even as simple as “online multiplayer” if they set a threshold on some value too low) and that people who played one had a decent enough overlap with people who played the other.