steam250
Club 250 news: Watchlists & more
Published: January 8th 2025, 5:23:16 pm
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 list button 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 list, an additional drop-down button will appear, allowing you to choose one or more other lists to add to.
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By default, everyone has a list called Watchlist. However, the default can be changed or renamed on your profile page using the new My game lists widget.
Here you can create new lists, rename and reorder them, change the default or delete a list you no longer need. The View button embedded in each row takes you to that games list, showing all the games on that list. The link can be shared with anyone you choose by copying the URL from the address bar in your browser.
Speaking of your profile page, we completely redesigned it so it doesn't look... (as) bad any more!
More improvements to this page and to Watchlists are planned. Here's a sneak peak at what's currently in our Watchlist planner.
This feature is available now for all T2 members. T1 members can upgrade at any time to activate this feature. If you downgrade or your subscription ends, your lists will still be accessible, but you will no longer be able to modify them.
Tag hierarchy
We added a new tag hierarchy feature, which is more than just the pretty, interactive chart shown above: any of the child tags (shown at the outer edge of the circle) will now automatically apply the parent tags (shown in the middle), whenever the child tag is present and valid for each game. For example, Balatro currently has the implied tag, tabletop, applied to it because it already has the tag, card game applied. This means Balatro will be included in the tabletop tag ranking, despite not having the tag applied on Steam.
The goal of this change is to make tags more useful by normalizing tags across all games by applying our tag hierarchy. However, this feature is still incomplete because we have only mapped out the relationship to tier-1 genre parents; we still plan to add tier-2 genre parent tags whenever our esteemed contributor, Austin from Discord, gets around to finishing it. It is thanks to him that this feature exists, so feel free to say thanks if you see him!
Steam games sync
T2 members will also enjoy automatic Steam games synchronisation, which keeps track of which games you already own on Steam. The current sync status can be viewed on your profile page.
The synchronisation feature itself was added last year, but the status panel is new, which lets you see exactly when sync last occurred, how many games were synced, and if any errors were encountered - and how to fix them! Oh yes, and the big purple button that ranks all the games you own is new. It uses the Steam 250 algorithm, so if you own all the games on the Steam 250, the first 250 games on your ranking would be exactly the same.
Additional features
We added trending now! to the trio of trending rankings. The trending rankings now consist of the following varieties:
Trending - any games trending on Steam, based on review velocity over the lifetime of the game's release.
New & Trending - as above, but restricted to games released in the past 30 days.
Trending Now! - any games trending on Steam, based on review velocity over the past 24 hours only. 🠘 This one is new!
We entered a mutual partnership with IsThereAnyDeal to syndicate their best price across affiliates, so you won't miss out on better prices, if there are any cheaper offers than on Steam! No money was exchanged, we simply link to each other so our users can enjoy the best of both sites.
Custom Ranking gained a few new options:
Added EA option to filter in/out early access games. This is more reliable than using the tag of the same name.
Added foreign option to filter in/out games that have English language support. We plan to expand this to all languages in the near future, so you can filter the languages you're interested in (besides just English).
App details pages got a new first seen data point added, which shows how long a game's page has been publicly visible. Wukong's page was actually visible a whole year before it was available to buy. We also added four tooltips to various data points to better explain what they mean. Tooltips themselves also got a facelift and some accessibility improvements to make them look nicer and easier to use.
Over on the Steam 250 side, we added a new filter option to hide games you already own. This works in partnership with the Steam games sync (T2) feature.
We changed the length of all rolling period rankings to be longer, that is:
This week was extended from 30 ➜ 50.
This month was extended from 50 ➜ 100.
This quarter was extended from 100 ➜ 200.
This year was extended from 150 ➜ 250.
We added a new free games ranking in lieu of old Free to Play tag (which is still available) because our tracking of free games is more reliable than the tag (which can be applied to any game by anyone).
Finally, the homepage got its popular tags updated, based on how often people view each tag page. Many of the same tags remain, but this updated resulted in the removal of RTS and Story Rich, which were replaced by Gore and Dating Sim. We also added three extra featured tags: Card Game, Family Friendly (& Casual) and Controller!
That's it for this update. Have any comments or suggestions? Let us know on Discord or in the comments below. We're also interested in helping anyone who can code and wishes to contribute get the support they need to get started, so get in touch if that's you.
See you next time!