steam250

Q2 update

Published: July 20th 2021, 10:40:59 am

I owe you guys an update, it's been a little while! I don't get a lot of feedback on these posts so I don't know what you guys want to read about. We usually do a recap and a bit of looking forward so let's stick with that for now but please leave a comment with your thoughts, if you liked this update or want to see something else; it will encourage me to write these things!

We've managed to complete everything on our current roadmap. Since last year, we've added automated updates, top 250 and hidden gems historical charting, similar games suggestions, historical rankings (which we will get to in a minute), publisher and developer pages, game search by title, create your own ranking (advanced search), including multiple tag search and a Patreon sign-in. That was everything on our list, and although many of these features are still a bit rough or incomplete, at least we got out a first version for each of these things.

Club 250

Let's begin with a chronological walk-through on the Club 250 side.

March 31st - historical rankings

On March 31st we added Steam Top 1000 historical ranking pages. To access these, we can click the "peak" badge on a game's detail page, if that game has a peak ranking within the top 1000 games on Steam at some point during its lifetime. That will take you to the view of the ranking on the day it reached its peak position.

Whilst this can be a good way to find historical ranking snapshots, it's limited in that it is currently the only way to access these pages. We can jump to the ranking on any day in the past by editing the URL, but of course we should add a date picker to make it easy to select the day you wish to view.

April 8th - adult games

We were notified that adult games were missing from the site, and indeed, they had been missing for many months, probably over a year! Not only did we fix the missing adult games but we back-filled all the reviews that we had been missing out on and recalculated all the rankings to include them retroactively. Unfortunately we could not do the same for historical pricing data yet, but everything else is complete and correct. Example.

We also added a new, pink 18+ badge to mark such games on the Steam 250 side. At some point we'd like to add an adult games only ranking that could be accessed by clicking that badge.

April 27th - revamped charting

Until the end of April, we were using two different charting libraries for our charts, which would slow down page loads: one for the top two and another for the pricing chart at the bottom. We wanted to unify our charting by slimming it down to just one library, without sacrificing look, feel or functionality. If I told you the left side is before and the right side is after unifying our charting, would you be able to spot the difference?

Of course, the purpose was not to make any radical changes; rather, we were trying to make them look the same... but we did manage to squeeze in a couple of new cool things during the upgrade: there is now a peak position label for the hidden gems ranking and a toggle that dynamically switches the review history between discrete and cumulative display modes. The discrete mode is somewhat similar to the Steam store view, but we also added the steam reviews line that shows what proportion of reviews were verified Steam purchases (as opposed to key activations).

However, we also lost one feature provided solely by the old charting software: CSV export. I am aware some publishers were actually using this feature, even though we didn't develop it directly. Generally we create features for gamers rather than publishers, but we might reintroduce this feature if there is demand.

May 18th—May 28th - Steam login

On Steam 250 we can login with our Steam accounts but on Club 250 we can only login with a Patreon account. This is a pretty terrible system for a number of reasons:

• Causes confusion for users by creating separation between the two parts of the site when we would like them to be tightly integrated.
• The Patreon login doesn't really do anything right now besides disable ads.
• Discourages people from logging in if they don't have a Patreon account, even if they do have a Steam account.

During this period we worked to replace the Patreon login with a Steam login similar to the one on Steam 250. This would enable us to add personalized user features based on your Steam profile, which is very important to us and opens up many cool possibilities. The work was completed on Club 250 but we didn't release it yet because it's a little tricky finding the best and most secure way of synchronizing logins across Steam 250 and Club 250, which is necessary because we don't want to have to log in to both parts of the site separately. We have a solution to this single sign-on problem so this should be the next feature we ship.

Once Steam login is in place on Club 250 you will be able to link your Patreon account to your Steam account to get club benefits. Exact details will be revealed later, but in short, we will be adding some new subscriber features as well as putting some existing features behind the subscriber wall (mainly to reduce load on our systems, discourage scraping and mitigate DDoS attacks).

July 6th - Discord relay bots

Our Discord server is slowly gaining popularity so we added some new bot channels that announce pre-release games as soon as they're added to our system (shortly after they go public on Steam) and some behind-the-scenes operations logging. We may add more feeds in future, such as a release day channel and early access graduation channel.

Steam 250

Over on the Steam 250 side we had  a few updates as well.

June 14th - Takeover & Redesigned quick-links

The title graphic for this post features the takeover design we did with New Blood. This was just a test to see how a takeover might look and behave on Steam 250, which we featured for one week. Since the background was very high contrast, we had to make a few more changes than anticipated but even though this was a temporary promotion, it also caused us to slightly redesign some parts of the site permanently.

The most notable change was to the so-called quick-links, which used to be where the banner was now placed. These text links at the head of the page have been with us since the beginning but they were not clicked very often despite being convenient links in a prominent part of the page for some of our most popular content.

We changed our classic two-column ranking layout to a three-column layout and placed the newly redesigned quick links in the new column.

Since this new design went live on 11th of June, we can see a marked increase in the use of these links, around triple the number of clicks compared to the previous three months.

June 22nd—July 1st - Storybook

This is a very nerdy section so feel free to skip. Many websites jump-start the web development process by using something called Bootstrap to manage their user interface. At Steam 250, everything is hand-coded from scratch, but somewhere along the way things got a little difficult to maintain, as our single CSS file (that holds all the user interface styling information) became a couple of thousand lines long. One way to manage that is to split it into smaller files; another is Storybook.

Storybook is a way to visualize our various UI components. To get to that point, we first have to break down our code into reusable components, which is a very useful organization tool as it ensures each visual element is self-contained and reusable. Moreover, we get the benefit of being able to browse each component and each of its states separately from the Steam 250 website, which can be really useful to visualize everything that can happen without having to find or fabricate the data that would normally cause that state.

For example, if we wanted to see all the different permutations of the so-called app line (each row of the games ranking), that's easy to do with Storybook because we can just turn on and off all the different tags, labels and other elements. If I wanted to test, say, the 18+ label without Storybook, I would first need to find an 18+ game which is a tedious extra step that Storybook eliminates. Perhaps the app line wasn't the best example, just because we haven't actually added it to Storybook yet, but we will; meanwhile you can still browse our current Steam 250 Storybook components, which will be automatically updated as more are added.

We originally looked into Storybook because we wanted to isolate the checkbox component, which is quite complex because it is written entirely in CSS (without JavaScript) and has two very different modes of operation, dubbed on/off and A/B, which is the difference between turning one option on and off, and choosing between two mutually exclusive options. One of the modes was a bit wonky visually and actually had two different implementations instead of just one. By isolating it and refining it in Storybook, we were able to fix the code and fix the UI visuals and I expect we will do the same with more of the UI in future.

Roadmap

Where next? As mentioned, we already completed everything on our current roadmap, even though most of those things can be improved further. We also talked about wanting to deliver synchronized Steam login across both Steam 250 and Club 250 sites so we can deliver rich personalization features, such as automated game recommendations that match your gaming habits. Besides that, I have a few more ideas floating around.

One idea is to move the roadmap off Patreon and have an interactive roadmap on Steam 250 itself, and moreover, have it be interactive so users can vote features up or down. We may also invite users to contribute suggestions directly to this new, interactive roadmap.

We want to organize tags better by classifying tags according to their type. The current tags list is a big mess with no way to easily identify related clusters of tags. By colour-coding similar tags we want to make it easier to find and understand tags on Steam.

We want to better reward Patrons for their support and especially those who have been with us along time. Currently, we have an ambassadors page that is manually updated to include people who pledge $10. There's a number of issues with this. First is that I have to update it manually, the second is that names are removed when their pledge is removed, and the third is that it only acknowledges the highest pledges. We want to acknowledge everyone who has contributed to our success on an opt-in basis. It would work something like this: after signing in with Steam and linking your Patreon account, you could opt-in to appearing on the new club members page, regardless of pledge level. Of course, we would probably order appearances by pledge amount or something similar, but you would remain on the page once you've made a pledge and remain opted in.

That's all I've got for you this time, and boy was it a long one! Congratulations for making it this far. Do leave a comment and I'll see you all on Discord or in the next Patreon update.