steam250

Club 250 taking shape

Published: April 13th 2020, 4:03:31 pm

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 for full historical breakdown on the Patreon page. Let's tick off the ones that are done!

• Full performance history of games ✅ Shown in charts.
• Was this game ever in the Top 250? ✅ Shown in chart and attribute breakdown.
• How many days was it in the Top  250 for? ✅ Shown in attribute breakdown.
• What was its peak position? ✅ Shown in chart and attribute breakdown.
• What other rankings has this game  appeared in? ❎

Everything is complete except the last point, because we're currently only tracking the top 1000 games on Steam, which is analogous to the Top 250 ranking, just extrapolated over 750 additional games. We can add more rankings, such as Hidden Gems, but every new rankings implies an additional hour to render historical rankings each time the underlying data is updated, plus another 300MB of storage. We will probably do this for Hidden Gems but to do so for every tag on Steam would quickly become difficult to manage. We can do it, but it will be time consuming and expensive just to track each game's progress on less popular rankings, so it'll probably remain low priority for a while.

I plan to have these new pages rolled out next month so you can play around with them. It's a lot of work because it's an entirely new system of infrastructure to compile and render dynamic data to and from a persistent database, as opposed to our existing system that just renders daily snapshots to static pages once a day.

I look forward to putting these new pages in your hands soon!