2022: year in review

Update time! Steam 250 just had its 5th birthday in November 2022, so it's a little late to celebrate, but we can probably still get away with a tada emoji: 🎉! It's been about a year since our last update post so let's just get straight into it, starting with the most important changes.

New rankings

Steam Deck launched last year, and accordingly, we added Steam Deck Verified & Playable rankings with platform filtering support.

We also started tracking whether games have been flagged as adult, added a label accordingly and gave them their own Adult 250 ranking (don't click if under 18!).

Demos

We started tracking whether games have playable demos, so now you'll see a spinning disc icon on rankings which you can click to directly install the demo and start playing, where available! We also show a similar but larger icon when you click through to any of the game details pages on Club 250, as shown below.

Custom ranking

As seen in our header graphic for this update, we spruced up the Custom Ranking with some neat new options, including filtering by games with demos and by games with or without adult content. Interestingly, these two options are slightly different: whilst the demo option can either be on (must include demos) or off (may or may not have a demo), the adult option has three states: neutral (may or may not have adult content), none (must not have adult content) only (must have adult content). We didn't think it was very useful to search for only games that don't have demos, although if you disagree we could add this, too.

We now also allow you to completely change the scoring algorithm from the default (Steam 250) so you can apply all the existing search criteria using the hidden gems algorithm instead. This allows you to, for example, search for hidden adult gems with demos, if you want.

Finally, we changed custom rankings to be a member-only feature, as was always intended. You can still share your custom rankings with anyone, but only Club 250 subscribers here on Patreon can create new custom rankings. However, we increased the free trial period for new users from 14 days to 28 to compensate for this (free trials are available to anyone who has linked their Patreon account but not yet subscribed).

Miscellany

We extended the weekly email subscription feature to your profile page by adding a simple toggle option to (un)subscribe. I apologise for how awful this looks; will make it look pretty later!

Your linked Patreon account is now also shown on the page as a link back to your Patreon profile page, which can be useful for figuring out which account is linked if you happen to have multiple Patreon accounts.

Valve stopped publishing detailed information about which specific VR platforms each game supports, so we had to follow suit in removing all the VR platform icons in December. Their rationale appears to be that most VR games work on most VR platforms anyway.

In January, Patreon subscriptions were switched from the legacy first-of-the-month recurring billing model to their new "subscription billing" model, which just means your subscription will now recur on the corresponding day of the month on which you joined. That is, if you join on the 15th of January, you will be re-billed on the 15th of February. This does not affect anyone who subscribed before January 2023; you continue to be billed on the 1st of each month unless you end your subscription.

Nerd stuff 🤓

A lot of time has gone into making our systems more robust, adding more automated testing and features that would allow us to recover the system from any (rare) intermittent errors. This is to support continuity remotely, such as when on holiday, with only limited access to our systems.

To protect Club 250 from abuse, we had to limit the number of pages per day to 100 per IP. Hopefully you won't hit this limit as a normal user but let me know if you do. Some guy was very persistently trying to scrape Club 250 pages, and to get around this limitation, went so far as to DDoS us using Azure web services (granting him millions of IPs), which is annoying because we also call into our own site using the Azure platform, so we couldn't just ban all those IPs 😅. 

Someone managed to get their Patreon account nuked (deleted), but that account was already linked to a Steam account on Club 250, so when they signed in using that account it broke some things. That was a weird edge case we had to fix, even though it only affected that user.

Getting giga nerdy now, we upgraded our platform and a bunch of our core libraries, including migrating away from async implemented using coroutines and generators to the new PHP fibers model, which might not sound very exciting but unfortunately consumed a significant amount of time.

Finally, we added some background automation tasks to prune obsolete log data from the database, in order to keep data sizes under control and avoid growing indefinitely.

What's next

I can't blow the lid on all our pending plans, but here's one pretty neat feature that was functionally complete but we had to shelve due to more pressing matters.

This is an effort to categorise every tag on steam (as denoted by the colours) and allow you to dynamically sort and filters tags in real time. Despite being functional already, there is still a lot of presentation work to complete to make everything look nice, but this will most likely be the next big feature release when it's ready.

Google is on my case about giving people cookie and privacy notices so I have just a few days left to write a privacy policy to satisfy their (undisclosed) requirements, otherwise they're pulling all the ad revenue 😭. I apologise in advance if you have to click through annoying pop-up panels soon.

I am about one week away from a 3-month tour around South-East Asia, but will still be keeping an eye on things remotely. We recently implemented tools necessary to monitor and recover from any (trivial) problems... but if things go really tits-up then I'll need to check into an Internet café and pray its fixable.

Until next time, everyone, thanks for being a Club 250 member! 💖