Steam's latest 'experiment' is a new way of discovering games that's actually really convenient and useful

The latest big idea out of Steam Labs is a calendar—but not just any calendar! No siree, this is the "Personal Calendar," which tracks new and upcoming games that Steam thinks might be of interest to you.

How does Steam figure out what sort of new games you're interested in? The magic of algorithms, of course, based on what you're playing and what other people with "similar playtime profiles" are adding to their wishlists. The system is "re-trained" with new data every day, although Valve says you're not likely to see major changes in recommendations aside from the addition of upcoming games that fall within the calendar's window, which extends out two months from the current date.

"We've been drawn to the idea of having a visual representation of upcoming releases in calendar form to help understand how far away an exciting new launch is," Valve explained.

"So this new calendar view takes the list of soon-to-release titles, filters them down to the set that we recommend most for you, and maps them out across time for you to see at-a-glance. You'll find that some days have a bunch of exciting releases for you while others may only have one or none."

You can filter your results with a "tag filter," and also adjust the number of games it shows from 10 to 500, which narrows or expands the recommendations accordingly.

This my 10-game calendar, for example:

And this is my 500 game view—quite a difference! (And a lot of stuff I've never heard of.)

I sometimes joke about Steam's over-reliance on algorithms, but the reality is that the sheer number of games flowing on Steam every week means human curation just isn't workable. Even browsing the store using Steam's many tools can feel overwhelming. This calendar is much simpler and easier to manage: At a glance I can see what I missed and what's on the way that's reasonably likely to be up my alley, without having to do anything but scroll. I like that a lot.

As a "Steam Labs experiment," the new Personal Calendar is still a work in progress, and Valve is looking for feedback—you can tell them what you think in the Experiment 16: Personal Calendar discussion forum.