What to know
- Steam is trialing a “Personal Calendar” through Steam Labs that curates recent and upcoming game releases aligned with your library and play history.
- The feature appears as “Experiment #016 Personal Calendar” in Steam Labs.
- It shows games released in the last 7 days, last 30 days and forthcoming releases, based on your playing habits.
- The calendar is tailored to your most-played games and allows customizing number of entries shown.
- This remains an experiment and is only available for users who opt-in via Steam Labs; full rollout timing is not announced.
Steam has implemented a new experiment called “Personal Calendar” which aims to improve game discovery by presenting you with a timeline of games that are either newly released or about to release, weighted according to your play history.
How Steam's Personal Calendar works
The Personal Calendar automatically compiles a list of recent and upcoming game releases tailored to individual players. It divides content into three primary tabs: “Released in the Last Month,” “Released in the Last 7 Days,” and “Upcoming.” The calendar displays information directly in the Steam desktop client or through a web browser. Users can customize how many games appear—from 10 to 500—and rearrange view settings according to preference.
Each listing updates daily and chronologically, ensuring the timeline reflects last‑minute schedule changes or surprise releases. When no major titles are expected within a month, the system automatically rolls forward to the next month.
How to try Steam's Personal Calendar experiment
Players eager to test the Personal Calendar can visit the Steam Labs page on either the client or the web version and manually enable experiment No. 016.
Like other Steam Labs initiatives, this test depends heavily on community feedback to refine its interface, sorting logic, and accuracy before a full public release.
Recommendation engine improvements
Unlike Steam’s older recommendation tools that pulled broadly from a player’s library, the new algorithm focuses more precisely on games with higher playtime. It excludes fringe titles the user may have sampled briefly. The feature also highlights wishlist items even if they differ from the player’s usual game types, helping ensure key titles are never missed.
Steam emphasizes weekday listings because most games launch Monday to Friday. Weekend days are omitted to streamline display space and reduce clutter. This data‑driven personalization model reflects an improved recommendation engine integrated seamlessly with Steam’s broader effort to enhance discoverability.
With thousands of new releases each year, visibility is a growing challenge for game developers and players alike. Personal Calendar aims to make Steam browsing more efficient by filtering out noise and providing meaningful, time‑relevant recommendations. It also complements Valve’s ongoing experiments, such as the redesigned store layout and updated search functionality, both intended to make game discovery more intuitive.
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