The use of recommender systems is everywhere. On popular platforms such as Netflix and Amazon, you are always given new recommendations on what to consume next, based on your specific profiling. This is done by cross-referencing users and products to find probable patterns. The aims of this study were to compare the two main ways of generating recommendations, in an unorthodox dataset where “best practice” might not apply. Subsequently, recommendation efficiency was compared between Content Based Filtering and Collaborative Filtering, on the gaming-platform of Steam, in order to establish if there was potential for a better solution. We approached this by gathering data from Steam, building a representational baseline Content-based Filtering recommendation-engine based on what is currently used by Steam, and a competing Collaborative Filtering engine based on a standard implementation.

 In the course of this study, we found that while Content-based Filtering performance initially grew linearly as the player base of a game increased, Collaborative Filtering’s performance grew exponentially from a small player base, to plateau at a performance-level exceeding the comparison. The practical consequence of these findings would be the justification to apply Collaborative Filtering even on smaller, more complex sets of data than is normally done; The justification being that Content-based Filtering is easier to implement and yields decent results. With our findings showing such a big discrepancy even at basic models, this attitude might well change.

 The usage of Collaborative Filtering has been used scarcely on the more multifaceted datasets, but our results show that the potential to exceed Content-based Filtering is rather easily obtainable on such sets as well. This potentially benefits all purchase/community-combined platforms, as the usage of the purchase is monitorable on-line, and allows for the adjustments of misrepresentational factors as they appear.