steam250

May monthly update

Published: June 6th 2018, 9:20:51 pm

At the end of last month we launched our Steam Curator group, and today the total number of followers reaches 1,100! Most of this growth seems to have come from the Spring Cleaning event, which has now ended, but whilst it lasted many new people followed us because the event encouraged following curators. I'm still unclear how they found us exactly, but it seems some of the old games people were being recommended to play were on the our Steam Top 250 ranking, and they found our curator via the store, even if we were on page 4 or 5. 

My plan is to work on building a full history of Steam game reviews to power the new website with complete historical data, but before that, I think it might be worth expanding the curator with more rankings, such as Hidden Gems and the top games for each year. It will take quite some time to build the new site, and during that time I think the curator will grow more if it offers more, so it's worth taking a quick diversion now to do that.

We also released the new Developer ranking, which went over well on Twitter, being retweeted by major developers as well as many others. According to analytics, that Tweet has been seen over 66K times. I'm still not completely happy with the way the ranking currently works, and may re-release it with a new algorithm. I'm putting off launching the Publisher ranking until the algorithm has been refined, although you can still view it with this link, if you wish!

Behind the scenes, I tackled more technical debt. We no longer store all our data on GitHub because it is not designed to be a data store and there are technical issues with abusing it for that purpose, including manual maintenance work and progressively longer build times. It's very important to have the site running seamlessly without intervention, but currently there's still one more outstanding issue that needs addressing to avoid random build failures that I need to resolve on some mornings.

Once the remaining site reliability issue is handled and the Steam Curator is expanded, it'll be time to work on the new site. There's still a number of small improvements I could make to the current site, but they're not important enough to delay the new site any longer. The possibilities of having a fully interactive historical ranking website are too great to delay further!

Thanks again to you for your continued support. It is my sincere hope and expectation that we will see more support and interest when the new site is ready, because it will offer much more value, but it means a lot that you continue support me now during our early days!