Total review backfilling was completed in February just as planned! We now have all reviews for all games on Steam, and with that, we can generate rankings since 2010-10-15, when the review system first launched on Steam. Even though Steam 250 launched in November 2017, we can retroactively generate rankings as they would have appeared at that time from seven years prior. But what does that mean for you? It means this.
We can chart the performance of
Besiege amongst the Top 250 since its launch into early access in January 2015. We can see that, within its first month of launch, it went straight to rank 64 and then steadily declined over the next five years as newer games took its place. Interestingly, when it exited early access, although this boosted sales, it did not have a discernable impact on its overall popularity.
Similarly,
DUSK quickly entered the Top 250 after an early access launch, but has continued to garner interest and review ratings from players, improving its position since then rather than steadily decline.
ADOM has had a bumpier ride, never actually entering the Top 250, but as you will notice, we have extrapolated our top 250 ranking to include the top 1000. This lets us see how close games have come to entering the top 250 since release.
The top 1000 chart is just the start. Next we will add a stacked positive/negative review chart to visualize the correlation between reviews and the overall ranking. These charts will be available for all games when the Club 250 site launches. My full time employment ends this month, and it is my goal to get these exciting new data insights into your hands by the end of April.
Now for some random stats from our review data. As mentioned, the first reviews were posted during the middle of October 2010, although from what I can gather, this feature was a closed beta with limited access. On that day,
92 reviews were posted on
67 different games by
46 different users. On Monday 17th February, 2020,
51,611 reviews were posted on
4,356 different games by
48,783 users.
You might also be wondering how many reviews are in our complete database.
46,508,083. That's
3.5GB of review data, without any of the text.