steam250
Team pages and 2020 conclusion omnibus update
Published: January 7th 2021, 11:34:08 pm
Happy New Year patrons new and old! We have a few new members this month so a warm welcome to those who recently pledged, and along with them, we have tons to cover in this month's update so let's get started.
The first major feature are the team pages now live on Club 250 and linked from all app details pages where applicable. We chose orange to highlight publishers and blue to highlight developers, which are collectively referred to as a teams, as both have similar pages and there's a lot of overlap in the Steam data (to be more precise, Steam makes a poor distinction between the two, which limits what we can do). These pages list games by that team ordered by their global rank (as seen on the top 250). It's not immediately obvious how they're sorted, but this is just the first iteration of the team pages so expect iterative improvements to follow.
Team pages are linked from the new left-hand sidebar navigation heading, that lists more games from the same developer and publisher as the game currently being viewed. You can use this to jump to other games from that team or to the team's new dedicated page with the header link. Once again, games are sorted by their global ranking.
In order to sort by global ranking we also had to calculate the global ranking, so we also do that now, too! We now also display the global rank of every game on its app details page, whereas before this was only displayed if it was in the top 1000. In the following example, we can now see Artifact ranks as the #34836th game on Steam. Interesting! At some point we will also let you paginate through the entire ranking, too.
On the Steam 250 side we added a new Steam Previews page, listing all upcoming unreleased games due out in the next 7 days on Steam, ordered by release date.
Continuing to work with Simon Carless from over at GDC, we further refined the owners and gross/net sales estimates. This update reduces the estimate for games that have been discounted, presuming a higher proportion of sales are made to gamers looking to pick up discounted titles. Games that have been been discounted will be unaffected by this adjustment.
Oh yeah, and we redesigned the random game button to look cooler!
Next steps
We have just signed a formal partnership agreement with 2mg to bring AI Steam game recommendations to Club 250 members. By the end of Q1 we hope to be able to show to show off this exciting new tech that takes the work out of discovering new games on Steam by having the site present similar games to you automatically. The first iteration will recommend games based on the game you're currently viewing, but further iterations will be able to analyze your entire Steam profile and make personalized recommendations based on all the games you've played.
But before that! The very next step will be to launch the advanced search AKA custom ranking which lets you search for exactly what you want by combining tags you're interested in and/or excluding tags you don't want. Although it is not part of our service contract, 2mg have also helped with this by providing the following UX diagram for this feature.
This design is somewhat simpler than I originally intended, but it covers the essentials like tags, dates and pricing for the initial launch and we can iteratively improve it thereafter. We're aiming for the end of January for this one!
Thanks for reading and your continued support. Lots more cool stuff on the way!
Press coverage
Almost forgot to mention, as 2020 drew to a close, we received significant press coverage from around the World focused on our Best of 2020 ranking. Most notably, we received our first coverage from PC Gamer this year, which was also our largest referral. Here are the top stories ordered by referral traffic.
1. PC Gamer (UK/US)
2. PCGH Online (DE)
3. Meio Bit (PT)
4. Overclockers (RU)
5. BSC (TR)
6. GamerSky (CN)
7. ALi213 (CN)
8. ShiftDelete (TR)
9. Muropaketti (FI)
10. Oyuncu Bülteni (TR)
11. GRY-OnLine (PL)
And many, many more, including PCGamesN and Game Informer!