Enhanced title search & new member welcome

A warm welcome to all our new Patrons! We're on the road to leaving the Club 250 beta period soon, and as such, we're moving some of our premium features behind the paywall instead of giving them away for free as we do currently. We're trying to keep most features behind the lowest wall of $1, but thanks to that, our patronage has almost doubled in the last two months, which is very encouraging.

Specifically, we made the price history chart chart sign-in only whilst ranking and review history charts are now for members only. Originally we did not make this change as part of any grand money-making scheme but because rendering the charts was one of the heaviest loads on our database, so avoiding serving them to bots and other anonymous users that crawl our site saves us a significant cost.

Enhanced title search

Our search by title page has received a few enhancements, as pictured in the title image of this post. We added add app type buttons so you can better refine what you're looking for. Previously, all categories were included, except DLC. Now you may include DLC or pick any other combination of categories as you wish. Moreover, we removed the restriction that you had to specify search terms, so now submitting a blank query is also valid and will therefore allow you to search for all items in the category. Still to come, we want to show more than 50 results for subscribers and add pagination also; look forward to that in a future update.

Patreon link & sync

A large portion of our time was spent implementing better Patron integration. Previously, users had to unlink and re-link their account to update their membership status, which was cumbersome. We added a one-click sync button so you should never have to unlink your account again!

Furthermore, behind the scenes we added auto-sync, which will occur at various times to sync your Patreon account status automatically. This is needed to ensure the system revokes privileges when a subscription expires, otherwise someone could stay subscribed forever by refusing to sync their account!

No-ads on Steam 250

Last update we added no-ads on Club 250, but that feature was missing on the Steam 250 pages. We managed to sync them up so now Club members will see no ads or nags on any part of the site!

Subscriber tier changes

As we continue down the road towards the end of the Club 250 beta period, we will continue adding more subscriber features to the various subscription tiers, to offer more rewards for our members. Part of that change will include switching currency from US dollars ($) to UK sterling (£) next month, since we are based in the UK. Therefore, the $1 tier will become £1, $5 will become £5 and so on. We hope this change will have minimum impact for you, but do let us know if it causes any problems and we'll do our best to fix it.

We are also considering either changing the Advocate tier from £1 to £2, once we've added a lot more features to it, or just introducing a brand new £2 tier. This is mainly because the current $1 tier is very inefficient: with the overheads of payment processing and third party cuts, we see very little of that one dollar. However, I understand some people may be unhappy about such a change, so do let me know your thoughts. In any case, there is currently no firm date for such a change, so we have plenty of time to think about it and give you appropriate heads up before it comes into play.

As ever, looking forward to your feedback and I'll see you in the next update!