Many games have tens of thousands of owners on Steam, yet no one will play the multiplayer solely because no one is playing it.

This has become a big issue, but it has an obvious solution: Let all players know when people are likely to be playing that game.

So, I bring you this:

http://i.cubeupload.com/Ryomxq.png

What you're looking at is a slight tweak to the Steam library.

Every game with multiplayer elements that has an average playercount below 20 receives a session scheduler.

The session scheduler allows you to vote for a time when you would like other people to play that game.

The session time is the median of all votes: As you can see in the picture, for Hidden Dimensions 3 it's the 30th of October, 1PM.

What happens when the session time comes about?

Three things:

1) FOR ALL OWNERS OF THE GAME: For one hour, the game will display as orange in the Steam library. In the picture, you can see that "Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages" is in orange, meaning the session time was reached within the last hour.

2) FOR ANYONE WHO VOTED WITH THE SESSION SCHEDULER: A notification will appear, saying that the game is having a session.

3) FOR THE GAME: All votes are cleared, allowing a new session to be scheduled.

As you can see, the system isn't annoying in the slightest.

For anyone who doesn't vote, all they see is that games in their Steam library are sometimes orange.

Does this fix playercount issues?

Yes.

If a dead multiplayer game is patched, it appears blue in the library.

For a brief time, people play the game in hopes that other people are playing, because they know other people will have the same response.

This is exactly the same thing, except that it appears as orange in the library instead, it's more regular than patches, and people have a warning so they don't miss it.