steam250

New search, new rankings and more!

Published: September 4th 2020, 1:48:43 pm

1. Search

Lots 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 showing results categorized including DLC. Your feedback will determine which direction we take this in. Please note this it not the Power Search that will let you search by tag, dates, price, review score, categories, etc; that is still coming later this year!

2. Video player

Next up, we greatly improved the video player to include all promotional videos instead of just the first one, with pop-out navigation to move between videos. This doesn't work well on mobile yet but that will be fixed later. On desktop, simply mouse over the video frame to see the game title, number of videos and thumbnails of other videos.

3. Most reviewed rankings

That's right, 17 new rankings based on games that are most reviewed. 16 new rankings are split by year and the 17th is an all-time ranking for all games on Steam. These rankings don't care at all whether people voted up or down: they just count the number of reviews. This is interesting because the Boxleiter method supposes we can extrapolate number of sales from number of reviews. Even though we are not (yet) doing that, the relative ranking of one game to another based on number of reviews should be similar to a ranking based on number of sales.

4. Risers & fallers

We gave both a functional and cosmetic facelift to our ranking sidebar featuring the daily "risers and fallers". We now include a "dropped off today" section to show entries that were present on each ranking yesterday but not today.

In addition, we gave the risers and fallers UI an overhaul to make them more attractive whilst keeping the design as subtle as possible to not detract from the main ranking (that said, the main ranking also needs a UI overhaul).

What's next?

That's it for this month's recap, but here's a look at what's coming next. We mentioned last month there is difficulty keeping Club 250 up-to-date and that's still the case. Currently the six-step process is as follows:

1. Download Steam app list 4min
2. Scrape app details for every app 80min
3. Incrementally download all new reviews for each valid app with at least one review 100min
4. Process review "metadata" for each game (date of first review + total number of reviews) 30min
5. Process daily cumulative review rollup for each game (number of reviews per day) 45min
6. Recompute top 1000 ranking for all games 3min

These update steps take at least 4.5 hours on average and requires a huge amount of compute power, which is expensive. Not only is it not really practical in terms of time and cost, but there's further problems:

1. Since we count all the reviews we've collected to calculate our own review totals, and since we only add the new reviews added each day, there's a tendency for our counts to exceed those on Steam. You can see this on any Club 250 app details page, especially for high-traffic games, where the reviews tracked total exceeds the expected total. This happens because reviews are also deleted or made private on Steam, thus the total decreases, but since we just incrementally add new reviews, we have no oversight of the deletions so our number just goes up whilst on Steam it can go up and down. We would need to do a full reconciliation of the entire review catalogue to discover and remove deleted reviews which would be even more costly.

2. Since Steam 250 just uses the daily review totals reported by Steam, whereas Club 250 is using its own review counter, there is a tendency for the reported ranking for a particular game to mismatch. This looks pretty bad if you click a game and we're reporting a different rank on the details page than you just saw on a ranking.

Whilst it was necessary to download all reviews to retroactively calculate our rankings initially, it is not necessary to continue in this fashion going forward. If we instead just record the review totals as we do on Steam 250, review totals will always agree between Steam, Steam 250 and Club 250 and perhaps more importantly, our six-step update process is reduced to just two or three, which is much more efficient and manageable, so that will be our primary focus for next month. Once this work is complete we will be in a good position to add lots of exciting new features to Club 250.

If you enjoyed this post give it a like and leave a comment!

Cheers,
Bilge