Build your own ranking

We did it! We finally launched the first version of our Custom Ranking tool, AKA Power Search AKA multi-tag search; this one tool does it all! You can search for tags you like and exclude tags you don't like as well as choose from some price and date presets to narrow your search. Every ranking you create can be shared with others using the URL it generates after submission.

This is just the first version and I anticipate expanding it with more criteria (e.g. review score, ranking algorithm) and finer-grained controls (e.g. specific date ranges, specific price bands). Nevertheless, please feed back your thoughts so far to shape the direction we take.

When searching for multiple tags, each game must satisfy every tag selected, so if you select a lot of tags you may get no results. There has been some discussion about this on our Discord already after we noted one user tried adding 18 tags at once and left empty handed because adding more tags narrows the search.

One suggestion is to use a widening strategy instead, but this would dilute the usefulness of adding just a small number of tags. Another suggestion is to blend both narrowing and widening strategies, showing stronger correlations with the tag set (having more matches) before weaker ones (having fewer tag matches). Another possibility is to just add an option to let the user decide whether all tags or any tags should be matched. Once again, looking for feedback and ideas on this topic.

January recap

It's been another long month as we're now halfway into February. Several delays were caused by questionable updates to Steam's store pages that affected our ability to parse the correct price for various games and other apps. This change caused deluxe editions, soundtracks, spin-offs and other tangentially related products to appear before the actual game purchase area on various product pages. Mainstream titles including Valve's own Portal 2 and Half-Life: Alyx are affected. 

Why does Geoff Keighley's bookware spin-off appear before the actual product? Suffice it to say, on some pages I question whether even a human can tell what is the correct purchase area. From my analysis, it appears Steam now sorts pricing areas in ascending price order, instead of by relevance as it did previously. Valve may or may not fix this in due course, but we lost at least 3 days to finding ways to work around this bizarre pricing area reordering.

Aside from this, we did a ton of little fixes and updates across Steam 250 and Club 250. As usual I'll spare you the boring details, but some more notable changes include adding an early access ribbon to applicable games, improving our owners estimate for free games and increasing the week top ranking limit from 25 games to 30 to accommodate the increasing release velocity across Steam.

Next up

Our next focus is on game recommendations. This will be a two-stage release, the first part simply recommending games similar to the one you're currently viewing, whilst the second stage will make personalized recommendations based on your Steam profile. This is a big project and I'm expecting it to take at least a couple of months but we should still have something exciting to share in the next update.

Thanks for your reading!
Bilge