Review station updates

This past week I spent a gooooood amount of time revising the "Steam Recent Reviews" badge. I studied several hundred games to make sure Gameplainer was correct in identifying what the current "Recent Reviews" is for each game. Less than 10 reviews in the last 30 days? no badge. Less than 100 reviews in the last 30 days? You're capped to Very Positive. More than 100 reviews and higher or equal to 95% positive? Overwhelmingly Positive. I couldn't find a complete listing of this online so.. I might have to write a blog post dedicated to this soon!

Here's an example of the 30-day recent reviews chart for the game Roadside Research:

As well as that, here's some more review related updates:

• Reviews, forums, and sentiment navigation are unified for easier browsing.
• Revised the review monthly heatmap to use the correct Steam labels, addressing previous inaccuracies.
• Fixed an issue with Steam usernames not displaying properly on recent reviews.
• Resolved a crash when viewing DLC games sorted by playtime, as DLCs don't report playtimes.
• The 30-day histogram now goes all the way back to when the game launched. Previously it only showed the last 30 days. Now you can go back. And further back.

Review Station meets Xbox!

I added Microsoft Store support when developing Shredders, and didn't really update much since it shipped in 2022 - however I spent a bit of time over the past two weeks updating Review Station so it would also include support for Xbox. Now subscribers with Xbox games can breakdown all their reviews just like they can with Steam!

Here are some Microsoft specific things added:

• Microsoft reviews now show developer responses, and you can filter reviews based on whether you've responded.
• Reviews are translated if they originate from a non-English region.
• Votes up and down for reviews are tracked, along with the primary device used by the player.
• Sort Microsoft reviews by how unhelpful they've been voted.
• Reviews now display the device primarily used by the player (Xbox or Windows).

Sentiment reports

The review sentiment reports has been completely overhauled, allowing you to decide on a bunch of settings. Sentiment reports are based on positive or negative tags that Gameplainer adds to all reviews. You decide how many times a tag should be found in the dataset for it to be relevant for the sentiment report, and also how many percent actually matters.

It's been developed primarily for Steam reviews, but works great with Xbox and Meta Quest as well.

Discord bot updates

I did a complete overhaul of the Discord bot commands. You can read all about that here , but the gist is /stats will now work for all channels that Gameplainer communciates too - and will surface a bunch of trend lines and things that before you'd have to login to the website to see.

• Gameplainer alerts you when the Discord bot loses access to a server, so you can act quickly.
• Use the slash command /analytics to view trend lines of posts on Discord Channels for Steam forums.
• Configure visibility of Discord Channels created by Gameplainer, choosing between everyone, specific roles, or just you. I've been wanting to do this for ages and I'm super excited to see it finally live!
• The /stats command for review channels now tells you how many positive reviews are needed for the next Steam label tier.
• The /negative command allows sorting by playtime or most played since review.

Steam Forum Moderation has just been released in preview, available on request to Pro and Premium subscribers. It helps turn the scary seas of Steam Forums into an easy to grasp space for developers and community moderators.

Here’s the gist:

• Every forum post now gets a sentiment score. Hostile and questionable posts are surfaced automatically, so you can find people spoiling for a fight before they pull a thread off the rails, and you can also spot the ones who just need help.
• A new moderation dashboard collects flagged users in one place. Filter by tag, severity, communication type, and sort however you want.

• Click a username inside a topic and the view filters to only that person's posts. Trouble users are also linked across topics, so if the same poster is causing friction in five different threads, you see all five.
• When a flagged poster has reviewed your game, the moderation page links straight through to the review.
• Each topic now shows a temperature chart. Topics under three days old graph hour by hour, older ones graph day by day, and topics under three hours old skip the graph entirely because there isn't enough signal yet.
• Team posts (developer, moderator, officer) are tagged as team posts, also searchable
• The moderation page works on mobile! I tested it on my crappiest phone and I still liked it.

There’s a bunch more to come as I refine the tool. If there’s something you’d like to see added, let me know!

Steam Reviews

• Review tags now carry polarity. Was "graphics" mentioned positively or negatively? You can tell at a glance and click through either side (or even if the tag is neutral).
• When Google Translate goes down (it happens more than you'd think), Gameplainer now falls back to Claude for review translation. No more gaps in your foreign-language sentiment view.
• Static review histograms now show the snapshot date clearly, so there's no confusion about what "this week" actually covers when you're looking at historical reports.

Discord

• New slash command /language window:recent returns sentiment over your last 30 days, your current Steam label, and how many positive reviews you need to reach the next tier.
• /analytics now supports Twitch performance metrics over day, week, month, or all time.
• /analytics for Twitter (X) now includes a small graph showing post volume across the period.
• Twitter and X channels send Discord messages via fxtwitter by default, so embeds work in the channel much more reliably.
• Twitter usernames now show correctly in Discord slash command output, and the noun is fixed (a Twitter channel used to report "20 videos posted this week", which made no sense).

Social Search (Twitter and Bluesky)

• When creating a new Twitter or Bluesky channel, you can set username filters and follower-count filters from the start. Previously you had to create the channel first, then go back and edit it.
• Twitter searches are no longer automatically wrapped in quotes on creation. Wrapping is now an explicit choice rather than a hidden default.
• Twitter search setup now has full documentation explaining how to actually build a useful query, including how to use the boolean syntax introduced in the last release.

Quality of life

• iOS sessions now stay logged in for two weeks. Less retyping on the phone.
• Tweet filtering by specific usernames and follower count had quietly broken. Fixed.
• The "recent reviews" graph was showing the wrong score when paging through historical weeks. It was a UTC vs local-time mismatch. Sorry about that.

Steam Forums

• When someone posts in your forum, Gameplainer now flags whether they own your game and whether they have reviewed it. The signal shows up on /forums and inside your Discord notifications, so you can tell a frustrated owner from a passing tourist before you reply.
• Forum pages on gameplainer.com/forums load noticeably faster after a refactor and some new database indexes.

Steam Reviews

• Tagging now runs across positive reviews as well as negative ones, so the "what players love" side of the picture is finally as detailed as the complaints.
• The review chart for brand new releases defaults to the last 24 hours, and for games out under a week it defaults to the last 7 days. The old 30-day default left launch-day charts looking empty.
• Every quoted snippet in a sentiment summary now links straight back to the Steam review it came from. If a player wrote something striking, you can read it in full context with one click.
• The weekly Steam review report now lands on Wednesday instead of Thursday. Here's this weeks!

Twitter

• Twitter searches now accept boolean syntax. Use AND, OR and brackets to build something useful, e.g. UNDERDOGS AND (vr OR mech OR hamsa OR quest). No more drowning in unrelated mentions.

Twitch

• Stream start times now display in your local timezone instead of UTC.
• Discord notifications for Twitch streams deep link to that specific game's streams page, not the catch-all list of every stream across your account.
• The streams page no longer says "1 viewers" when there is only one person watching. It now says "1 viewer", as English intended.

Reddit

• Searches for new posts targeting specific subreddits were quietly returning nothing. Fixed. If a subreddit-scoped search has felt like a desert, that's why. Sorry about that 😅

Reviews

• New Last 30 Days view with arrow buttons that step you back week by week. Useful for watching sentiment shift in a specific language over time.
• Xbox reviews now link straight to the Partner Center, with review date and region shown in each Discord message
• Gameplainer can now send comments to Steam reviews to a Discord Channel. Read more about that here
• Word clouds now count each word once per review. A reviewer hammering "fun fun fun" no longer warps the picture.
• Non-English word clouds get translation support with a toggle, plus hover tooltips showing the original word and its translation side by side.
• Word exclusion lists now handle non-ASCII characters properly. Or at least a little bit more properly.

Twitch

• Search your game's Twitch streams by streamer name.
• Every streamer table is click-through. Tap any row to drill into that streamer's page.
• Live streams page gets a tab layout: Live, This Week, All Time.
• Each stream now shows its language, and mature-content streams are flagged in search results.
• Viewer-count charts render as step lines. Viewers are integers, not a continuous signal, and the chart finally reflects that.

  

Steam Forums

• New per-user page. See every forum post a given player has made across your game, no more hunting thread by thread. You can toggle team posts too!

YouTube

• Pro and Premium tiers now get refreshed view counts.
• Offline (eg deleted, private) videos are flagged in the results list.
• Stats panel header now reads "Total Views" instead of "Total Videos". Apologies to anyone who stared at that and thought the math wasn't mathing. It's mathing now.

Twitch

• Added Discord embed support for Twitch live stream notifications, including streamer name, stream title, viewer/follower counts, and a live stream thumbnail image.
• Language of the streamer is now displayed in Twitch stream notifications.
• Links to live streams are now clearer in Discord embeds.
• Fixed a bug where Twitch live stream notifications would get lost if "Twitch Videos" were set to send once a day.

Steam Reviews

• Reviews that are updated now show changes with a red/green highlighter to easily spot additions or removals.
• Even when a review is completely rewritten, changes are visibly highlighted in Gameplainer's review station.
• The Review language graph now looks better on smaller screens, enhancing usability.
• When returning reviews to Discord that have been translated, the original review text is used if the translated text is identical, addressing a weird edge case.

Steam Forums

• Fixed an issue where Gameplainer couldn't import a Steam forum topic if it lacked a topic header (I have only seen this live on Steam in non English markets but it's possible)
• Resolved an issue where users couldn't change Discord channels in Gameplainer for Steam forums or Steam community posts and streams.

Lots of little changes have just been pushed to Gameplainer - particularly to Review Station. Really excited about the new search feature!

Reviews

• Complete overhaul of review search: now supports boolean search for your reviews, dev replies, and translated text, just like classic Google.
• New review report added to analytics: see the breakdown of countries for your game reviews.
• Fixed the review filter to correctly show reviews that have been flipped after a developer response.

Twitch & socials

• Added a whole bunch of graphs to the streams analytics page, giving a detailed view of Twitch history.
• Social index pages now feature a cool sparkline for a quick visual overview.

Discord

• The Discord settings page is now accessible from the streams page.
• Included URLs to reviews when using the Discord /ten command.
• Resolved an issue where a second Discord server added to an account was not visible in the settings page.
• Fixed a bug where changes to your Discord channel weren't saved correctly. Oops 😅

Social Overview page

• A brand new 'Social Overview ' page is now live, consolidating your social media stats into one convenient location. Read all about it here

Steam Reviews

• Reviews are now presented in a bar chart format, breaking down positive and negative reviews per language, with markers indicating the number of positive reviews needed to reach the next Steam rating.
• The language bar visual has been cleaned up to show how many positive reviews are needed to reach the next rating threshold (e.g., Mixed, Mostly Positive, etc.).

Bug fixes and improvements

• Improved Twitter search functionality now supports searches containing colons and differentiates between similar phrases like "Order: 13" and "Order 13."
• Bluesky search now supports '&'.
• Fixed issues with navigation and filters on the review page to improve user experience.
• Resolved issues with Twitter search functionality to support more complex queries accurately.
• A whole bunch of tweaks to support users signing in with Discord or via Email (and now supporting users that use both)

Teams

• You can now invite colleagues to view your Gameplainer dashboard with an email invite. Super easy! Head to settings/team and go to town
• You can now also sign up for Gameplainer with an email address, no Discord needed!

Reviews

• Introducing Audience Overlap: See what other games your reviewers play and their sentiment compared to the overall playerbase.
  

  
  
  
  
  
  

• Review auto-response generator now uses your last 5 responses to maintain consistent tone and syntax.

✨ Enhancements

• Bluesky users with only a handle (no name) are now correctly displayed in messages.
• Searches containing ampersands now work properly, thanks to feedback from Cosmoteer: Starship Architect & Commander.
• Whole bunch of backend updates and fixes

New Features

Steam Forums

• Brand new home page for Steam Forums with improved navigation.
• Added a drop-down filter to display changes since each developer's last post or any developer's last post.
• Steam Forums are now linked to demo reviews or DLC reviews to allow mapping of forum feedback to specific apps. Now you can see which app (a demo, your DLC, or main app) is linked to which player feedback

Reddit & Google Alerts

• New analytics chart available in channels to better visualize your alert data.

✨ Enhancements

Steam Forums

• Last sync date is now visible on both the index and activity pages for better tracking.
• Activity pages are now paginated for easier browsing. ### Bluesky, Twitter & Reddit
• Improved support for phrase searches and negative word searches.
• Tweets will now summarize exclusions and abbreviate follower counts for clarity.

🐛 Bug Fixes

Steam

• Fixed an issue where games with no reviews wouldn't sync correctly. ### Twitch
• Resolved a bug preventing more than 20 streams from being returned for certain games.
• Corrected a bug where a streamer's follower count would be incorrectly displayed as viewer count.

🚀 New Features

Steam Forums

• New report shows forums updated in the last hour, 8 hours, 24 hours, week, or since a team member posted.
• Forum overview now includes stats on the percentage of visitors who reviewed and their review sentiment.
• Displays the number of forum threads posted in the last 8 hours that haven't received a team response.
• Added links to associated Demo, DLCs, and Music app forums on the reviews page.

✨ Enhancements

Search Setup

• Improved discoverability for "negative" keyword searches on Twitter, X, and Bluesky, making it clear when setting up new searches.
• Color-coded icons for new searches on YouTube, Twitter, or Bluesky to easily identify the platform.

Mobile Experience

• Blog posts, especially the weekly Steam review, are now better formatted for mobile viewing.

🐛 Bug Fixes

Reddit

• Fix for Reddit searches that have more than 3 sub-reddit filters.

Steam Reviews & Forums

• Fixed an issue showing "56 years since last played" for reviewers who never played the game. Oops 😅
• Corrected post identification to properly indicate if a user post was a reply or a first post in a thread.

Discord Onboarding

• Resolved duplicate prompts for setting up a Discord server when users only have a Discord user account for Gameplainer.
• Fixed missing channel in the dropdown menu when creating a new Gameplainer Channel for Discord.

UI and Icons

• Fixed a missing icon in the social analytics graph.