Show HN: Making good Steam games discoverable again | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Making good Steam games discoverable again

steam250.com

44 pointsBilge-23 comments

Hey! So cool to see this on HN. I love Hidden Gems, mainly because my game is usually on there. :)

A few things I've wondered about:

* Have you considered only counting non-key reviews, as Steam does for the main review total? Curious because I'm currently in a weird position where I have 100% for non-key, but one of the key reviews is negative. And, well, Valve thinks that a good way to count.

* Can you describe how player count factors in? Is it total players or current players? Can the algorithm be understood intuitively?

* I know this is silly, but some sort of Hidden Gems badge/widget would be cool.

Thanks so much for your comments and questions!

* Although excluding key reviews positions your game better, and therefore seems like a good idea from your perspective, from our slightly more neutral perspective, why would we feel compelled to make that change? Aren't key activation customers just as valid as Steam purchasers, whose reviews and opinions are equally valid?

I'm not really swayed by the argument that Valve thinks it's cool. I don't know why Valve thinks that's a good idea; it may be because they have no oversight over how keys are distributed, or it may be to encourage you to push punters to purchase on Steam because it makes them more money, but their reasons are their own.

Aside, I'd posit that whilst it may look better for your game, it may look equally better for other games, too. There's no guarantee your game would be in any better standing for making such a change.

* Player count factors in fairly minimally for games with relatively low sales. It's just there to stop big names taking over the ranking. We use the total player count; that is, anyone who's ever launched the game.

* You're not the first person to suggest a badge-type widget. I wish we could do that but please understand the site is statically generated at present. Until we have dynamically generated pages we're quite limited in what we can do. It will take several months to get there, but once it's possible, having an embeddable widget would be cool!

In the meantime you can create a game tracking link for your game which will load the page centred around wherever your game is in the ranking, and highlight it. To generate one, click the link icon that appears when hovering over a ranking entry.

I worded that poorly. I was not suggesting to make a change, only that my particular situation made me curious about your thoughts. Valve's recent change to ignore key activations is actually super frustrating when first starting out.

I wasn't even really thinking of a dynamic widget. Just some simple image that could be linked to your site. However, it would be better if there were permanent historical pages. I'm not sure how to categorize it (maybe every week or month), but the link would make more sense then... you can't guarantee you'll still be on the rolling page. Just an idea.

Interesting, I didn't know key review exclusion was a recent change.

Are you just looking for press kit resources? There's a somewhat dated press kit available from https://github.com/250/Steam-Top-250/releases/download/press... that might contain some useful images. If you're looking for something more specific, let me know!

Charting game ranking history is my personal favourite upcoming feature. I want a graph with the full history of a game's ranking across all rankings, so you can easily see how many segments it's participating in both past and present. However, another limitation of the current infrastructure is we don't have a persistent data store. Every day we create a new, independent database snapshot containing only that day's data. Once again, this feature will take several months to develop, mainly because I have to go back to work now because I didn't receive enough funding via Patreon, but I'm looking forward to it at least as much as you :)

Well, when I say "recently" it was a little over a year ago: https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam-reviews-change

I was a bit miffed, as it was announced right as my game was going into EA. Most devs will hand out keys to testers and potentially launch with a dozen or so reviews from that, but with that change none of those were "counted". Then you have to wait for 10 more people to buy and review it before you even get a "Positive" summary.

Thanks for the press kit link. That works. I didn't want to be using images like that without permission.

Do you have any plans to integrate curator recommendations? Or just regular users?

Big fan of including a "bottom 100" section, a lot of platforms don't do this but I find that sort of thing very interesting, so thanks :)

Also I LOVE the hidden gems section, was just wondering if you had any plans to go beyond 250.

Thanks for your feedback and questions! We have a lot of plans, but none that involve integrating curator recommendations, I'm afraid. On the contrary, one of our next goals is to do the opposite: create an automated curator that delivers Steam 250 recommendations directly back into Steam. For a peek at our roadmap check out the Patreon page https://www.patreon.com/steam250 under the "What's next?" heading.

Some further details are in a secret Patron-only post ;)

It seems interesting, although in the Best Seller List I would post a All-time list, of course, the more time you are in the market, more quantity you sell, but its interesting to see a Counter Strike Global Offensive with 4x GTA V (In Steam).

Good job.

This is now live at http://steam250.com/owners Thanks for your suggestion!

The movement indicators for this ranking won't be meaningful until tomorrow.

I'm an avid PC gamer and Steam-browser. Without knowing how this works, the results look excellent to me. I'd definitely use this.

Thanks. Your approval inspires me with confidence and determination :^)

Wow, this is great! I've hoped for Steam to implement something like this for ages, but they seem bent on making discoverability a hopeless chore.

By the way, I saw it on the top games chart on the site, but "Terraria" is a really fun game. Runs on Mac and Linux, too.

https://terraria.org/

It's like a 2D platform version of minecraft.

Adding onto this, Factorio is a game that will greatly appeal to the HN crowd. It's a 2D topdown version of Minecraft that is focused on manufacturing via the construction of large factories. Instead of mining coal with an axe, you build a drill over a coal deposit, which funnels coal to a boiler, which pumps steam into a steam engine, which powers another drill, so on and so forth. The developers don't put the game on sale, so feel free to jump on it. I've got played >100 hours.

Starbound is also worth mentioning here. Its universe is larger and includes more sci-fi stuff but sacrifices easy onboarding. Love them both :)

I've owned Starbound for at least a year now, and only just started playing last week. Hell of a learning curve, but definitely worth checking out if you liked Terraria.

Is this official? If not, it seems likely that Valve will make you change the name.

I doubt they will, they haven't complained to/about steamspy.

I got served a C&D from Valve through Apple for a "Steam Sales" iOS app I made when I was 15, so they do do it on occasion. On the web it's a little more of a hassle, so they probably won't bother.

Same for SteamDB, we didn't get any C&D from Valve.

Hey Tomáš, I didn't know you worked for SteamDB :^)

It's certainly not official, no, and I hope they don't make us change the name what with sites like Steam Spy and SteamDB running around, too ;)

I mean it's hard to mistake the site for Steam itself with the "Open source rankings of Steam games curated by the players" tagline, plus they link to Steam.

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