The popular and trending games tend to feel generic and samey to me, I want a way to search for weird and obscure potential gems.
You can sort Steam games chronologically, which will show you an unfiltered list of new games by release date. To do this, go to "New & Noteworthy" at the Store page header, click "New Releases" from the submenu, then scroll down.
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Switch the games listing from "Popular New Releases" to just "New Releases." This will show you a list of the most recently released games on Steam.
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If you want to see a full, page-based list of all the releases on Steam, click the button "All New Releases." The results here can easily be narrowed by genre, release type (e.g. excluding Sountracks and Demos), language, price, and other factors. Bear in mind Steam will still exclude Adult games if you've set Steam to do so (which I believe may be the default). Other filters for mature content will also be applied if you've set them up to. Steam will tell you at the top of the page if it's doing this.
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If you do want a more curated experience (but don't want an opaque algorithm filtering things out), you can always change the sort method at the top right. There are other ways to get to this menu (it's the same one Steam uses for user searches!), and other cool ways to find games, but this is one that works if you genuinely want to see everything with no algorithm deciding on your behalf what you want to see. Asset flips are actually not too common these days because they're not financially viable on Steam any more (because new releases need to "earn" featuring from Steam and because of the refund policy), but you will still find a lot of mobile ports if you do this.
Well if you go to the top right of your library where it shows your username, click it and go to "store preferences" you can enable all the content. mostly this just turns the new and trending page into a collection of garbage porn VNs though, but rarely you'll see a real gem like Fear & Hunger
I want a way to search for weird and obscure potential gems.
You'll probably have to sift through a mess of AI generated and asset flipped shit lol
That's a price I'm willing to pay if it means a chance of seeing something that's not Roguelike Deckbuilder #65535 or Yet Another Open World Survival Crafting Game
Lol those are my two favorite type of games. (If the the survival craft is good, most aren't)
There's a thing in the interactive recommendation where there are sliders that go between popular/niche and newer/older. I've been getting a lot of luck setting it to niche and old.
A lot of us noticed that this got fucked up with the changes to the store for the steam deck. They have fixed a few of the complaints but it’s honestly either enshittification finally reaching steam (hope I’m wrong but there are a lot of examples to point to that suggest this) or an inexperienced team with no care about what people actually want and wanted to just do something trendy. I hope it’s the latter but them seemingly doubling down on this shit interface they call a “store” makes me think otherwise.
Gaben save us, ahmen.
I wouldn't be surprised if they made the store shitty on purpose so that you're more likely to stumble on and impulse buy something you weren't actually looking for.
