steam250

April monthly update

Published: May 2nd 2018, 10:52:26 am

Hello, friends. It's time for another monthly update!

Despite working every day of April on Steam 250, I haven't much to show you because most of the work was concerned with improving our infrastructure and addressing "technical debt". It's essential work but doesn't involve much fun. We took a lot of short-cuts to launch the site quickly in November, and now we must repay that debt by spending time making it more robust and efficient, so it doesn't keep breaking and requiring manual intervention. To that end, we successfully deployed a new "asynchronous" infrastructure that sped up our daily Steam data import from 1½ – 2 hours down to just 20 minutes! You may have noticed the site now updates much quicker and earlier in the day than before.

However, we did launch one major new feature this week: the official Steam 250 automated Steam Curator! Go ahead and check it out to see the Top 250 ranked games featured on our curator page. If you click the follow button on that page, you'll see tips from us whilst browsing the Steam store from time to time, such as whether the game you're browsing is a Top 250 rated game.

The curated games are updated automatically every day, at the same time as the site. If a game moves up or down, its new ranking will be reflected immediately in the curator reviews. If a game drops off the ranking, we'll keep its curator review, but change its status from recommended to merely informational.

As far as I know, we're the only curator on Steam that uses a robot to automatically curate reviews, so that's pretty cool, technology wise. In future I want to expand the curator to feature other rankings, too, starting with the Hidden Gems!

This month also saw the death and partial rebirth of Steam Spy, which is relevant because we used to use their data for some of our rankings. Since its death, we've had to remove the most played, best sellers of 2018 and all time best sellers rankings. Best seller rankings for previous years are still available, but using an old data snapshot that will eventually become obsolete. However, during Steam Spy's rebirth, the players data came back online, so we may be able to restore the most played ranking shortly. Regarding best sellers, we'll probably not restore those unless Galyonkin finds a more reliable data source, because he's only exposing very broad estimates at the moment, e.g. 20K-50K owners for a particular game.

There's still some technical debt to be addressed this month, but it's a lot less than before, and I'm positive we'll see more new features in May. However, I have dedicated almost 100% of my time to Steam 250 in the past 6 months and it's coming to the point where I need a sustainable source of income. To that end, I am looking for a full time job and will be interviewing at a company I like tomorrow. If successful, it will inevitably take time away from Steam 250 for a while, but don't worry, I still love the site and will still dedicate as much free time as I can!

Feel free to leave a comment and I'll see you all in the next update~! 😎