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Club 250 news: Watchlists & more
Welcome back to the Club 250 newsletter! The headline feature of this update is Watchlists, but we have plenty of other goodies too! Watchlists allow you to keep track of interesting games. They are similar to the Steam wishlist, but you can have as many as you want, and we plan to do more with them in future.Whenever you visit an app details page, you'll notice the new add to listbutton next to the badges.Hovering it will expand to show the name of the default list that clicking the button will add the game to.If you have more than one lis...
2024 winter highlights: Tags and more galore!
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...
2023 highlights
Happy New Year! What do we have in store this time? There have been some major features and many smaller ones since last update. Let's kick off 2024 with a review of the latest updates to Club 250!Steam tag categorizationThe feature we teased at the end of the last update and showcase in the title graphic of this post has finally launched and been available since July 23rd: the new and improved interactive Steam Tag Directory! This radically improved our admittedly rather poor prior offering, which just listed all tags ordered by frequency....
2022: year in review
Update time! Steam 250 just had its 5th birthday in November 2022, so it's a little late to celebrate, but we can probably still get away with a tada emoji: π! It's been about a year since our last update post so let's just get straight into it, starting with the most important changes.New rankingsSteam Deck launched last year, and accordingly, we added Steam Deck Verified & Playable rankings with platform filtering support.We also started tracking whether games have been flagged as adult, added a label accordingly and gave them ...
Way past due an update!
Hello lovely patrons! I don't like to spam you with over-communication, and past posts have had fairly low engagement, so I wasn't going to post until I had something exciting to share, but we're way past due an update so let's have a quick poll instead.More updates? π€
Club 250 Weekly Edition email launches
We've been hard at work to bring you our first email featurette: the Club 250 Weekly Edition! Each week we can deliver the top 30 games of the week directly to your inbox! As of this writing, the next edition is due to go out in a few hours and if you don't want to miss it, just subscribe using the previous link. The approximate time the email will be sent is highlighted on the subscription page. This feature is currently being soft-launched so we can iron out any bugs, but we'll be placing the sign-up link all over the site in the ...
Enhanced title search & new member welcome
A warm welcome to all our new Patrons! We're on the road to leaving the Club 250 beta period soon, and as such, we're moving some of our premium features behind the paywall instead of giving them away for free as we do currently. We're trying to keep most features behind the lowest wall of $1, but thanks to that, our patronage has almost doubled in the last two months, which is very encouraging.Specifically, we made the price history chart chart sign-in only whilst ranking and review history charts are now for members only. Original...
Patreon account linking
In August we brought you two major new features: cross-site synchronised Steam login and the poster-child for this month's update, Patreon account linking!Synchronised Steam loginSynchronised login means that when you log in or out with Steam, no matter whether you do so from Steam 250 or Club 250 domains, your login will automatically be synced on both sites at once. So that's pretty neat. Ultimately this is probably what most people expect to happen but it was technically quite challenging to pull off. Many things would be a lot simpl...
Q2 update
I owe you guys an update, it's been a little while! I don't get a lot of feedback on these posts so I don't know what you guys want to read about. We usually do a recap and a bit of looking forward so let's stick with that for now but please leave a comment with your thoughts, if you liked this update or want to see something else; it will encourage me to write these things!We've managed to complete everything on our current roadmap. Since last year, we've added automated updates, top 250 and hidden gems historical chart...
4 major updates in under 3 weeks
It has been less than 3 weeks since our last update when we introduced the advanced search in the form of Custom Rankings. We've got an update to that and three other major updates for you already!As discussed last time, results from the custom ranking search might not have been what users expected when adding lots of tags at once, since all tags must match each game. Now, if you add two or more tags to include, the option appears to switch modes between all tags and any tag. In the new any tag mode, adding more tags widens the search inste...
Build your own ranking
We did it! We finally launched the first version of our Custom Ranking tool, AKA Power Search AKA multi-tag search; this one tool does it all! You can search for tags you like and exclude tags you don't like as well as choose from some price and date presets to narrow your search. Every ranking you create can be shared with others using the URL it generates after submission.This is just the first version and I anticipate expanding it with more criteria (e.g. review score, ranking algorithm) and finer-grained controls (e.g. specific date ran...
Team pages and 2020 conclusion omnibus update
Happy New Year patrons new and old! We have a few new members this month so a warm welcome to those who recently pledged, and along with them, we have tons to cover in this month's update so let's get started.The first major feature are the team pages now live on Club 250 and linked from all app details pages where applicable. We chose orange to highlight publishers and blue to highlight developers, which are collectively referred to as a teams, as both have similar pages and there's a lot of overlap in the Steam data (to be more pr...
November update
Most of November was spent fixing backend issues, which won't be very interesting to most of our readers, so I'll keep this paragraph brief. We're exhausting our daily IOPS on the database backend, so the site will run very slowly in the early hours of the morning (UTC). We've tried to alleviate this by introducing caching, but only 1-2% of page views are cache hits with a two-hour lifetime. We can either solve this issue by throwing more money at it to buy more IOPS or by spending time optimizing the workload, but that also mea...
Price history and sales estimates
We hit our first target quite early in October, backfilling all game pricing history data and publishing an interactive chart to explore it. As a big bonus, we teamed up with GameDiscoverCo to use this data in sales estimates. These features have been live for a few weeks now but we pushed an update yesterday that improves the estimation accuracy and we will continue working with GDC to make further improvements.You can see how the site changed since last month in the header graphic. Many improvements! We also redesigned the badges below the ga...
3 months, 3 targets
Last month may have looked quiet, but suffice it to say, I was working all month to accomplish what I set out to do: improve Club 250's back end to have consistent daily updates like Steam 250. You might recall from last month's post that updates were taking 4.5 hours manually, now they take about 2 hours running automatically. I also managed to squeeze in application monitoring at the very end, so if anything goes wrong I'll be alerted so it can be fixed.Here's a breakdown of our new automatic update process:1. Download Steam a...
New search, new rankings and more!
1. SearchLots of new stuff this month. First up, we have a proper game title search now. The search bar used to just invoke a Google search of page content on Steam 250 but now it'll match games and other Steam apps by title. The search is tolerant of minor spelling errors and we may further enhance this do be more forgiving in future. Currently it searches all apps on Steam except for DLC and results are limited to first 50 best matches. All this may change in future, from being able to search in more than just titles (e.g. tags) and showi...
New homepage!
For a long time we wanted to create a new Steam 250 homepage with a dashboard interface to give a clear overview of many of the rankings on offer. Until now, the homepage was our signature Top 250 ranking only, but I think this dashboard interface should be more valuable for helping new users discover more of the site.I haven't achieved as much as hoped this month since being diagnosed with sleep apnoea. During the week I felt good, I banged out the new home page working non-stop, but the rest of this month has been a difficult time for me....
First month of Club 250
It's almost been a month since Club 250 went live and we've accomplished a lot in that short time. So much work has been done behind the scenes but also on the scenes, and I wanted to showcase a before and after in this month's update picture so you can easily compare how the site has changed visually last month. By next month I expect just as many more improvements.We've updated our about section with a list of of what's coming next. As ever I am regretful much work still needs to be done behind the scenes, since that work ...
Club 250 live!
Club 250 features are now live across the site. Simply click on any game title to be taken to the new game details page. This page shows a historical chart of each game's ranking within the top 1000 games on Steam since release and a cumulative reviews chart. To the right you'll find a few interesting stats.This is all still very rough and there's a lot of improvements to make both to presentation of data and automation behind the scenes, which will be released in the coming weeks. Details to follow.For now, enjoy the first iteratio...
Club 250 launching in the next few days
Excited to announce the very first iteration of Club 250, with full ranking history for every game on Steam, is just around the corner. Will be going live within the next week. If you want a preview, check the previous post. As soon as it's available I'll post again. That's all for now!
Club 250 taking shape
Welcome to the March update. It's a little late this month because every day I delay making this post, the more exciting things I have to show. That's largely because I quit my job of 16 months just last week, so from Monday 6th I'm working on Club 250 full time.The post screenshot this month shows a preview of the new app details page. This page will be linked directly from the Steam 250 rankings (instead of redirecting to the Steam store). This page delivers on many of the promises originally laid out on the long-term checklist fo...
New Club 250 data insights
Total review backfilling was completed in February just as planned! We now have all reviews for all games on Steam, and with that, we can generate rankings since 2010-10-15, when the review system first launched on Steam. Even though Steam 250 launched in November 2017, we can retroactively generate rankings as they would have appeared at that time from seven years prior. But what does that mean for you? It means this.We can chart the performance of Besiege amongst the Top 250 since its launch into early access in January 2015. We can see that,...
Review backfilling
Review backfilling has begun and we're starting with the biggest games on Steam. Backfilling means downloading all the reviews for a particular game so we can chart its entire performance history. Here's the top five biggest games on Steam based purely on number of reviews, and the date on which we backfilled it.1. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive: 3,797,5602. PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS: 1,276,396 on 2020-02-03 at 18:453. Dota 2: 1,198,645 on 2020-02-02 at 21:224. Grand Theft Auto V: 689,532 on 2020-02-01 at 21:545. Team Fortress...
New ranking: trending games!
As promised, the new ranking for trending games is out now! This works a little differently to our other rankings, because whilst it still uses Steam reviews, it doesn't care whether they're positive or negative. We call this figure, the review velocity, which is the number of reviews per day. Furthermore, a game has to be released in the last 50 days for it to qualify as trending.I originally wrote this ranking whilst working on the new Club 250 database but found the results so interesting I immediately wanted to release it on the Ste...
Christmas and New Year update
I'm really excited to be working on the Club 250 website. It's the same kind of excitement as when we first started the Steam 250 project just over two years ago, all over again. To that end, I'm releasing a new ranking tomorrow, which was going to be part of the new Club 250 website, but I've decided to release it early to celebrate the new year and two years of automated Steam rankings! Full details to follow on New Year's day, complete with a longer Patreon post with all the juicy details. Please look forward to it!Happy ...
September-October update
On the new features front, we added USD prices across all rankings to give some idea of cost, even for non-US users. I wanted to take this further and make showing prices, tags and other things customizable in the filters menu but stopped myself getting carried away to focus on the new site, which now has a dedicated web server, database and some persistent data in it!Nothing to show of the new site yet as I've had to spend some more time improving our behind-the-scenes technology so it's as robust and reliable as possible for large sca...
July-August update
Hey Patrons!As ever, thanks so much for your continued support. We've removed advertising this month, so Patreon is now the only way Steam 250 is supported. This is not a commitment to never allow advertising in the future, although I would love to be in that position, but for now the ads are gone!I'm just about settled into my new home so development is pickup up again and expect to have something substantial to share with you in the next update, so I'm excited about that. However, with the recent unforeseen delays, it is likely th...
May-June update
I feel responsible for providing regular updates, especially since several new members joined us recently, but feel guilty about not having much to share. Work is proceeding behind the scenes, but most of it is not visible. Some changes to Valve's security model have posed a few challenges recently. Moving to a new PC, finally ditching my 10-year old computer, and moving house towards the end of this month have been a source of delay. To top it all off, this update is posted from a mobile hotspot because my Internet has been permanently dis...
March-April update
I wanted to give you guys an update because I'm still hard at work on the site, even though there's nothing particularly interesting to share at this stage. I'm writing our infrastructure as code to create the services to support the new site. Things like web servers, databases, reverse proxies, firewalls, security applications, PHP, offsite backups... nothing particularly interesting but I owe you an update. I would like nothing more than to have something shiny and new to show you, but these are necessary steps to get to that shin...
February update
Let it never be said I don't deliver a few surprises from time to time; this month I bring you game trailers embedded in our new video player! Live on site right now, clicking any of the banner artwork in any ranking will launch the video player for that game's primary trailer. I hope you're as excited about this feature as I am because it's very comfortable and insightful to quickly jump into disparate game worlds and experience their sights and sounds with a single click. Now you can really get a good feel for what each game i...
