steam250

Price history and sales estimates

Published: November 10th 2020, 8:01:33 pm

We hit our first target quite early in October, backfilling all game pricing history data and publishing an interactive chart to explore it. As a big bonus, we teamed up with GameDiscoverCo to use this data in sales estimates. These features have been live for a few weeks now but we pushed an update yesterday that improves the estimation accuracy and we will continue working with GDC to make further improvements.

You can see how the site changed since last month in the header graphic. Many improvements! We also redesigned the badges below the game heading graphic to make them look way cooler.

You may note this update comes about a week later than expected. Since we had some spare time I decided to go ahead and implement user login via Patreon. That turned out to be more work than expected, and at the same time, we began being assaulted by several bots trying to scrape all our data. One of the downsides of publishing valuable information is it eventually attracts unwanted attention. We don't have the resources to spare on data farmers so some time was wasted handling that diversion.

Right now you can log into Club 250 with your Patreon account and you get a little profile page (as above) which shows your membership status. It doesn't really do much right now, but this lays the foundation for forthcoming membership features that will be accessible to members only. I suspect we'll also have to put the sales estimates behind the paywall to discourage the bots.

As promised, everyone who subscribed before now, when few benefits for membership were on offer, will be given lifetime free accounts to enjoy all these member benefits for life, as a way of saying thanks your early support. A line was drawn under the eligibility list on 20th October, however I am aware we got a few new patrons since then and am willing to extend the offer to today. Let me know if you're a recent subscriber who would also like such an account. Emails will go out to everyone who was eligible once we start adding exclusive member features, which should be later this year.

This month I want to focus on the advanced search which will let you build your own games rankings and share them with others. Should be exciting!