steam250

Club 250 Weekly Edition email launches

Published: March 11th 2022, 11:45:01 pm

We've been hard at work to bring you our first email featurette: the Club 250 Weekly Edition! Each week we can deliver the top 30 games of the week directly to your inbox! As of this writing, the next edition is due to go out in a few hours and if you don't want to miss it, just subscribe using the previous link. The approximate time the email will be sent is highlighted on the subscription page. This feature is currently being soft-launched so we can iron out any bugs, but we'll be placing the sign-up link all over the site in the coming days.

Astute readers may recognize the contents of this ranking are similar to our Week Top 30, however it requires an entirely new system to generate its content. This is because, if we just do the naïve thing and send the Week Top 30 content as at the date of email distribution, this will prejudice games that were just released and unfairly favour games released at the start of the week. We have carefully designed the weekly email to score games fairly by taking the score as at each game's 6th-7th day of release. Moreover, we ensure no cross-over between weeks, meaning every game has a chance to be featured once, without being missed or double-featured (except for early access games, which will appear once at launch and once again when leaving EA). The only downside to this approach is that it could take up to 13 days after release before a game appears in the email, so we may look to reduce this period slightly in future.

We hope you will enjoy this feature as a way of keeping up to date with what's going on in a weekly digest format. A static preview of how the email should look is displayed on the subscription page (and in the cover image of this news post), but we are aware that some email clients such as Gmail will not display styles correctly, which we plan to fix in a future update.

Improved pages

Since last time, we made improvements to the app details page sidebar and your profile page. See the following before/after image for the improvements to the app details sidebar. More to follow.

Expanded rewards

Depending on your membership level, some of the above data, in particular the GDC sales estimates, may or may not be visible. We wanted to provide more rewards for members, so certain Club 250 features have been moved to various membership tiers. If you are unable to see a feature at your membership level, a clickable tier button will notify you which tier is required to view the information. 

Clicking a tier button displays a pop-up highlighting that tier and showing all the rewards at that level.

Since new users will have no idea what is hiding behind each locked tier, we added a free trial feature for users whom have never been Club members before.

This can be found at the bottom of the tiers popup or from your profile page when logged in as an eligible new user.

Lots of fixes

Behind the scenes we did a lot of work to upgrade our platform and fix a lot of annoying bugs. This includes automatically syncing roles on login, so you should rarely have to reach for the manual sync button from now on. We also fixed some bugs, such as the wrong percentages shown on the discrete review history chart, login de-sync between Steam 250 and Club 250 and a particularly annoying bug where submitting a form could just redirect you back to the same page without actually submitting the form, losing your data such as on the search or custom ranking pages. At this time there are no known bugs so let us know if you find any!

What's next

As always, a big thank you to all our Patrons, for your continued support and for reading this update. You enable us to bring you more new and cool, shiny things!

We are now looking forward to improving our tagging system by fully categorising tags to make them more digestible. Our current tags page is just a mess! The new cataloguing system will colour-code all tags with distinct and meaningful categories, and at the same time, enable us to improve our primary tag chosen for each game. On Steam 250, we typically pick just one tag to show next to each game, but that tag is often not the most meaningful tag for that game. For example, indie or action doesn't really tell us anything about the nature of the game because these tags are too generic, whereas card battler does a much better job of conveying what you can expect. Please look forward to it!

Much love 💖
Bilge