Dev Log on Steam Recommender[P]

Traffic and Feedback

Since the Steam sale is live, I wanted to post a dev log on my personal project nextsteamgame.com, sharing some outcomes from the web traffic and how I changed the project from the great feedback I got.

I made a post about a month ago explaining how I made this open-source explainable search engine built around Steam reviews to help people find new video games - not through relevancy but through aspect-based similarity. Check out the old post for a better explanation if you want:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/1tb8k3n/steam_recommender_using_similarity_undergraduate/

I wanted to say thank you to all the people of r/datascience and r/MachineLearning that gave me feedback and tried out my tool.

Improvements Made

• Improved the UI/UX of the website to make the vectors more clear and controllable.
• Implemented a thumbs up and down feature on recommendations to see if users even like the tool.

Traffic Results

I also wanted to share the after effects of promoting this tool on Reddit. From the 2,652 searches I got on the website, 913 of them resulted in Steam clicks. The games that were discovered were all in a uniform distribution and did not share much of a pattern, showing me that the engine did its job in helping people find niche games across all genres. (More images attached to post to see data viz.)

Disclosure

I wanted to disclose that I made this tool to not make any profit of some kind, but it does use PostHog so I can collect diagnostics now.