[jere]

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.

[Bilge-]

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.

[jere]

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.

[Bilge-]

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 :)

[jere]

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.