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2024 winter highlights: Tags and more galore!
🕑 Added 2024-04-08 22:35:41 +0000 UTC
What major new features were added since January? Tags! We greatly enhanced the Club 250 tag pages, adding detailed descriptions for every tag, typically with a detailed breakdown of the common tropes and examples of quintessential games for each.
Writing so much content for 446 tags would have been exhausting (and it was), but we relied heavily on AI to help with this, since writing content is one of its greatest strengths. Still, a lot of manual corrections had to be made.
Sometimes Mr. Robot hallucinated games that don't actually exist. It tried to sell us on examples of meme games including classics such as, Dat Sekiro: A Dance of Damnation! and Meme Generator: Dank Edition. Whilst we can appreciate there might not be many famous examples out there, we draw the line at outright fabrications just to fill the space! On that note, do let us know if you find any further errors... there's bound to be some hiding in there.
We added a tag correlation map to show which tags most commonly appear together. This can be a great way to navigate the tag maze. Unsurprisingly, tags like Boomer Shooter have strong correlations with First-Person, Shooter and FPS. We can learn other interesting things, such as 87% of remakes are single-player. Thanks to Benny from Discord for suggesting this feature and helping classify tags.
Speaking of classification, we categorized all previously unclassified tags, adding some new categories (Input and Metadata), combined Audio and Visual into Audiovisual, as well as renaming Other to Unclassified and T1/2/3 Genre -> Tier-1/2/3 Genre for clarity. The all tags page is probably still the best way to start exploring tags.
Trending
We replaced the old Steam 250 Trending ranking with two new Club 250 trending rankings: Trending and New and Trending (working titles). The latter is actually the one most similar to the prior ranking, in that it only considers recent games, but the date range was narrowed from 50 days to 30. The new Trending ranking does not have a cut-off date, instead considering all games on Steam eligible to trend.
So why did we discard the old Steam 250 Trending ranking? Because it was broken. Whilst it worked for the most part, games that exit early access change their release date to the current date, which fooled the algorithm into thinking those games acquired all their existing reviews in less than 24 hours. The original release date is not available directly from Steam; we have to calculate it ourselves, which is something only Club 250 can do. Since the date we need is only available on Club 250, it makes sense that the new, fixed rankings would be part of Club 250 as a Tier 1 member feature. Of course, that does mean we no longer have a free (broken) trending ranking, which already made someone mad.
O well π
Mid features
That's about it for major features, but we also added a bunch of mid stuff.
We recently passed 100 Club 250 members π, so we used the money to upgrade our database, which has resulted in perceptible page load time improvement across all Club 250 pages and greatly improved the stability of our daily data updates so it no longer sporadically crashes (which is nice).
All rankings got a splash of colour added to the review rating percentage. This doesn't add much for rankings sorted by rating, but for those that are not, such as trending and most played, it's quite useful (and pretty!).
We finally added date navigation controls to the historical ranking pages. I say pages, plural, because we also added a historical ranking for Hidden Gems as well!
The particular look and feel of the date picker will depend on your browser. I think the Firefox one is best, but you probably use Chrome, so oh well π (sorry, I spent ages looking for a decent cross-browser date-picker but it just doesn't exist π).
Custom Ranking finally got pagination: no longer constrained to just the first 150 results, you can now page through every single game matching your search.
Most games (except newer ones) tend to feature a similar games panel. At the bottom of that panel, we've added a link to SteamPeek, even though those similar games do not currently come from SteamPeek, but our friends over at 2many.games. Nevertheless, as part of our effort to integrate with more Steam fansite communities, this is perhaps a first step to a closer integration with SteamPeek. We're also working on an integration with ITAD to bring cheaper prices to you.
Minor features
Changed the lesser-known previews ranking cutoff date from 1 week to 30 days. Now you can preview all Steam games due out in the next month!
Changed home page top-10 section headers to be wholly clickable, so you no longer have to carefully track over the title text. (Also made it look pretty).
We finally retired the ranking "fade" effect which produced a curved spine appearance across the first 15 rows in each Steam 250 ranking, each becoming progressively smaller than the last. Whilst some might think it looked cool, and it has been a signature effect since the site launched in 2017, it didn't serve any practical purpose and caused the other 235 entries to be much smaller than the head of the list. Now every ranking row is displayed in a consistent size.
Changed annual navigation items from one to two columns because we've got a lot of years now!
Besides that, fixed a bunch of stuff, like bundle-only game pricing detection (thanks to Wok for reporting) and optimized various things.
If you enjoyed this update, you can leave a like to let me know it was worth writing π
Comments
Matt Olick
Love this thank you so much for keeping this resource alive and evolving
Steam 250
The alternative would be to have no tag descriptions, but I understand where you're coming from. If it's any consolation, we did not pay anything for AI; we simply used the three month free trial. As stated, we have no further plans to use it.
Sam L. Kurono
It's not practical to do anything worthwhile. It's the human endeavour. It's not 'worthwhile' to climb Mt. Fuji, so let's have a drone do it for us shall we? Things I revere: Hard work and human ingenuity. As soon as I sniff AI I'm gone. Be it an indie game dev, you or a AAA studio... please don't make it the norm. PS. I don't mean hide it, I genuinely don't like the laziness of it. I really appreciate the features you've implemented upon my request but this really undoes all of that good work in my opinion.
Steam 250
We have no further plans to leverage AI at this time. That said, it would not have been practical to write 446 detailed tag descriptions without AI, so this feature would otherwise not exist. May I ask why are you against AI usage?
Sam L. Kurono
As a patron I would appreciate if you didn't use AI in the future. It would make me unsubscribe.
Brentwahn
What a fantastic update - thank you!
