Table of Contents
- Gather information
- Contextualize information
- Meet the metrics
1. Gather information
We run a series of scripts on our server that continuously gather information from a variety of sources: public API's, private API's, and scraping various sites directly.
We currently gather information from the following sources:
We currently only track stats for Steam games, but have plans to add stats for the following platforms (in roughly this order):
- Nintendo Switch
- Epic Games Store
- Playstation
- Xbox
- GOG
- Itch
- (No current plans for mobile games)
We currently only track applications classifed as "games" -- so no tools, demos, mods, bundles, DLC, editors, etc.
We run our server scripts continuously, updating the basic records for every game on every currently supported platform once per day.
The metrics we collect are simple facts directly provided by the API endpoints and pages we query (see
Meet the Metrics for more details).
2. Contextualize information
Once we have the data, we present several views for properly contextualizing this information. These views were designed based on interviews with game industry professionals including developers, publishers, PR agencies, and generally anyone in this field with a strong opinion.
Generally speaking, we do not provide statistical estimates. Instead, for any given category of thing we might want to measure -- such as performance or critical acclaim -- we measure several related metrics that we can get at directly. By default we display these metrics as
relative ranks (though the metrics can also be viewed in their raw form, or as percentiles). This means instead of saying a game has 14,386 of metric X, we say that for metric X, it is the #12 game on Steam. Our hypothesis is that various metrics will have some degree of correlation with the underlying insights our users are seeking to discover, and converting figures to relative ranks makes it easy to compare games directly, even if we can't say for certain what the absolute value of the underlying insight is (ie, "how many copies did this game sell?").
3. Meet the Metrics
We track an ever-growing list of metrics, which are exhaustively catalogued in the glossary below: