Steam Recommender using similarity! (Undergraduate Student Project) [P]

(DISCLAIMER: I accidentally deleted the last post on this subreddit my apologies if this is your second time seeing it)

Last year I made a post about my steam recommender The last one was great and served its purpose of showing many people new games, but this new version is much more functional!

I love making recommendation systems that tell the user WHY they got the recommendation.

During a Steam sale event, I always find myself trying to look for new video games to play. If I wanted to find a new game I would try to whittle it down by using Steam tags, but the Steam tag system is very broad “action” could apply to many many games.

This got me thinking, what aspects do I like about my favorite games?

Well I like Persona 4 because of the city vibes and jazz fusion,

Spore because of the unique character creation and whimsical theme.

Balatro for its unique deck building synergies.

What if I could capture unique tags that identify a game that aren’t just “action” and put them into vectors to show the (focus) of a game

For example, I could break Persona 4 into something like

Game play focus vector:
Day cycle 20%
Dungeon crawling 20%
Social sim 20%

Tags:
Music: jazz fusion
Vibe: Small rural town

I find that this system makes searching for games more “fun” now I can see why I like Balatro. I like it because of the card synergies not so much for its rogue-like nature.

I also find that this helps find new underrated games and beats the trap that Collaborative Filtering algorithms get into where it “feels” like you get recommended the same things.

Find your next favorite game! : https://nextsteamgame.com/

Pull a PR!: https://github.com/BakedSoups/NextSteamGame

(I actually made some git issues myself for problems I can’t fix)

If anyone has any criticism I would love to hear it! This is probably my favorite passion project. I made this during finals season, since the database takes around 1 day to build, there were some inevitable rate limiting errors that I went through. So I am sure there are many bugs. If you come across any and are willing to share that would be amazing.

Hope this website helps people find new games! Also I have an advanced mode for people that don’t mind messing with sliders and weird data terms.