steam250

2023 highlights

Published: January 6th 2024, 12:52:44 pm

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Happy New Year! What do we have in store this time? There have been some major features and many smaller ones since last update. Let's kick off 2024 with a review of the latest updates to Club 250!

Steam tag categorization

The feature we teased at the end of the last update and showcase in the title graphic of this post has finally launched and been available since July 23rd: the new and improved interactive Steam Tag Directory! This radically improved our admittedly rather poor prior offering, which just listed all tags ordered by frequency. Now, you can choose how tags are ordered: whether by name, frequency or the all-new categories! That's right, in addition to the tag organizer, we improved this page with a custom tag categorization system complete with colour-coding to make it easier to understand and organize tags, and not just on this page, but across the entire website!

It took a large effort to categorize over 400 tags, and whilst we've made a good start, there's still a few too many remaining unclassified in the other category. Ideally this category would not exist at all, and whilst a select few tags could perhaps not find a better home, the majority still require clearer classification. The field of tag taxonomy is deep and complex: many tags could arguably belong to many categories, either exclusively or simultaneously, and making a decision can be subjective. Anyone whom feels they may have an interest in helping classify some more of our tags is more than welcome, just let us know!

Automatic Steam games synchronization

Our second headline feature is the return of marking your owned Steam games on our rankings: it's back and better than ever. Privacy changes to Steam earlier this year now prevent anonymous users from viewing your Steam games collection, even if they're set to public. That meant we could no longer use the old mechanism to mirror your games list: we now have to create a Steam user account to view your games list (and it still has to be public).

Since this feature became defunct due to the Valve's change, we had a lot of requests to restore this functionality, and now it's back with the notable improvement that it also works on Club 250 rankings, such as the fully paginated Steam Top 250. The Club 250 rankings themselves have also received a slight facelift so they look and behave better.

We engineered this feature to automatically download your games from Steam and transparently keep them in sync every two hours across both Club 250 and Steam 250 pages with no interaction from you -- provided you're at least a tier 2 subscriber. Since this new approach requires us to mirror your games list in our database, we had to place this above the basic tier, which also provides long-overdue added value to those tiers. The good news is that since we now store your games, we can also use this data to build another feature: ranking your owned games using our algorithm! Expect that to follow in the coming months.

Custom Ranking additions

Custom Rankings are one of our most popular member features and now they're better than ever, as we added more way to refine your search with custom date range and price range options, as well as a simple exclude free toggle to turn off free games.

This allows you to do many things you could not before, such as:

Depending on your creativity, you may find other ways to utilize these new options! We also changed the number of results from 150 to our namesake 250, with a view to paginating results in future.

We hope this helps you find what you're looking for and discover new games, but if there's more ways we can help, do let us know. One popular request we're still planning to fulfil is the ability to scale how much number of reviews influences the overall score; that is, whether to prefer indie or mainstream titles more.

New review breakdown UI

After watching this video, in a moment of inspiration we redesigned our own review breakdown UI (three times!)

In fact, this image isn't even our final form! Check out any app details page to see the latest design.

Steam ID exposure

Sometimes it's useful to know your Steam ID. For people whom want to do that, simply log in and check out this latest addition to your profile page.

Miscellany

As always, there's a ton of smaller changes, not all of which are worth writing about. For example, we added the privacy policy page mentioned at the end of last update, to appease Google.

We added a more button to the end of the Steam Top 250 to help Club 250 members find the fully paginated Top 250 ranking (currently available to everyone, but that will change). We need to do more work around linking to help people find features like this and the historical rankings, since not many people know they exist, even though they've been available for years.

We did a crazy amount of technical work behind the scenes, at least equivalent to all the time spent on new features, but I'll spare you the details this time.

What's next?

Including the new features already mentioned, here's what's on the shortlist, in no particular order.

As always, if you'd like to stay more up-to-date with the goings on around here, be sure to join our Discord!

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