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Soooo it looks like I've been super quiet - but it turns out my change log just wasn't updating 😅 I've pushed over 200 updates the past six weeks, so there's a lot to catch up. Grab a coffee.

🚀 New Features

• Weekly reports are here. Pick a day, and once a week you'll get an email covering how your game is doing on Steam, Twitch, Xbox, Reddit, X and everything else Gameplainer watches for you. It's the whole dashboard, delivered, so you don't have to remember to go looking
• You can now tag reviews in bulk. Run a filter across your thousands of reviews, then apply a tag like "October multiplayer bug oops" to the whole lot in one go. Previously this was a one at a time job, which is fine for ten reviews and miserable for four hundred.
• A new graph breaks down your reviewers by how many reviews they've written. The skew is genuinely more interesting than I expected: the share of people whose only Steam review ever is the one they left on your game, versus the veterans with ten or more, varies a lot between titles.
• Refunded reviews are now visible in /reviews. Filter for them, or filter them away. This has been on my wishlist for literal years and it's finally in.
• A graph on the reviews analytics page shows your refund breakdown by country, compared against the average across all refunds.
• The refund chart is now also drawn on the review histogram, so refunds sit in context with everything else.

• The reviews by patch view gained an aggregate graph, so you can see your game's performance per patch release in one small chart instead of reading five. Or sixty.
• Sentiment analysis now runs on games with fewer than 100 reviews. It works better with more, but "not enough data, come back later" wasn't helping anyone.
• The review audience analysis tool now shows what reviewers of other games thought of yours. You can see how the audience that liked Armored Core 6 felt about your game!
• Publishers are shown alongside developers on the reviews page.

Steam Store

• When your Steam store metadata changes, you now see the diff. Description, tags, whatever moved, presented as a Git style diff so you can see exactly what changed rather than guessing what's different.

Steam Patches

• Patch notes can be imported directly from the review analytics tab.
• The Patch Notes page now clearly shows whether a game launched into Early Access.
• Patches are carried across between demos and full apps where that makes sense.

Xbox and Oculus

• Xbox and Oculus reviews can be filtered by star rating, and you can pick more than one at a time (1 and 2 stars, or 4 and 5, or 1 and 3 and 5 if that's your mood).
• Microsoft reviews are often posted anonymously with the username withheld, and Gameplainer now handles that properly.
• The Microsoft review checker reaches further into smaller markets and locales that were previously being skipped.

Discord

• If you've connected Discord to your review monitoring, you'll now get a message every time a review flips from Not Recommended to Recommended, or the other way.
• The /flipped command returns your most recently flipped reviews plus a sparkline of how many have flipped over the past week, 30 days and 3 months.
• Reddit channels finally have a working /stats command, with everything aggregated into one message like the rest of your channels.
• Twitch /stats now links the top 3 most viewed streams, so you can jump straight to the viewer graph and the screenshots Gameplainer captured every ten minutes.
• Posts made by a team member get a 👔 icon.

BiliBili

• BiliBili is now visible on the /socials page.
• Views, likes, favourites and comment counts are logged for every BiliBili video, all viewable in /socials.
• BiliBili searches have an optional flag to send links through vsbilibili.com so videos embed properly in Discord, the same way fxtwitter.com and tnktok.com work for X and TikTok.

Billing

• Invoices can be forwarded to another address, so invoices@yourcompany.com gets them without you playing middleman.
• Billing details (address, company name, VAT) are editable directly from /settings/billing.

✨ Enhancements

Steam Forums

• The date filters on forum posts have been rebuilt. They now tell you when the oldest and most recent posts actually are, so you're not guessing at an empty range, and the histogram is much easier to read when you're hunting for your noisiest days, weeks or months.
• Forum posts by developers produce much clearer Discord messages. It used to get confused trying to find the user who posted; now it just says it was a team post.
• The colours for your top five forum posters no longer collide with the colours used for owners, non owners and team members.

Steam Reviews

• The Review Analytics page works properly on mobile now.
• Review analytics moved out of the reviews page and up to its own tab at the top of the game page, where you can actually find it.
• The patch notes filter scrolls with you, so you can work through a long list without scrolling back up every time.
• The sentiment page is a little less confusing to use.
• Game details are now presented the same way across reviews, forums, patches, sentiment and analytics.
• The review histogram picks its buckets based on how long the game has been out. A game released three months ago no longer offers you a "1 year" view of nothing.
• Flipping between reviews, analytics, forums and patch notes is much easier on a small screen.

Discord

• /stats adjusts its time range properly. All time now means all time, rather than the last 24 months.
• The /stats sparkline shows up far more reliably, including for channels pulling from several sources or searches at once, and the top posts of the week have more detail.
• The /flipped report has been simplified. It's clearer how many reviews flipped positively or negatively per week and per month, and it covers all time.
• Google Alerts messages are tidier, with preview embeds where possible.
• TikTok messages print the video description as a blockquote with the username in bold.
• New TikTok searches can be set to message once a day or once an hour.
• Forum posts, reviews and comments that are nothing but an emoji now show up in Discord. They were being stripped to nothing before.
• Twitch /stats orders VOD videos by view count rather than follower count.
• Deleting a channel shows a spinner, so you know something is happening.

Twitch

• VOD view counts are refreshed a full two weeks after the video goes up, which is when the number actually stops moving.

Account

• The invoices page loads a great deal faster.
• The privacy settings page was tidied up so you can reach your GDPR data quickly.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Steam patches weren't being imported automatically. They are now.
• Forum posts containing a line break were being smushed into a single line on import. I don't know how I missed that for so long.
• YouTube searches using the pipe (|) OR syntax had quietly stopped working. Back in action.
• The flipped review report was only ever returning CS:GO reviews instead of yours, which was as useless as it sounds.
• The Reviews by Patch graph went wonky when several patches landed on the same day. Those are now merged into one aggregated "day of patches".
• Adding a new forum (posting your first News Post creates an "Events and Announcements" forum automatically) meant Gameplainer skipped it entirely. Oops.
• Older comments on a review could be re sent to Discord. Only genuinely new comments go out now.
• The review language breakdown could fall out of sync between the all time and 30 day charts. They're updated together now.
• Streams with zero viewers were pinging Discord every ten minutes to say a stream was live with nobody watching. Now it pings once and waits until viewers turn up, or until the stream ends.
• Asking for a page of reviews that doesn't exist used to throw an error. It now sends you to the last real page.
• Hopefully fixed the change log so I don't have to do this massive epic post again - here's to smaller posts more of the time!

Steam Reviews

• Added a new analytics page showing average playtime by country
• Sentiment reports can now be generated based on reviewer playtime, focusing on early bouncers, average players, and long-time players.
• The playtime distribution graph uses dynamic buckets, accommodating games with varying playtimes from minutes to weeks.
• Reviews by country graph now displays the percentage of positive and negative reviews.
• Reviewer playtime reports now use median values to prevent distortion from outlier data and allow for dynamic minimum sample sizes. That one reviewer who played for ten thousand hours won't make it look like everyone played for 100 anymore.

  

Discord bot

• The /stats command now supports multiple search feeds into a single channel, aggregating all relevant stats for you.
• Bluesky, Twitter, and Reddit Discord channels can now receive a weekly report detailing keyword coverage, including the number of mentions per day.
• Implemented message flood control for reviews and forum updates, sending aggregate messages instead of flooding channels.
• Added settings to manage Discord flood controls through the /settings discord command.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Google Alert URLs are now flexible, supporting domains like google.fr and google.co.uk and even google.be 🇧🇪
• Resolved issues where 'unanswered by team' posts weren't prioritized correctly in the analysis page. Phew.
• Fixed bug defaulting TikTok search to hourly instead of the selected daily frequency.
• Twitch sometimes sent a duplicate 'All Streams have ended' message to Discord. That's fixed now!

What's new in Gameplainer

A pile of things shipped while you were busy reading your own reviews at 2am. Skim the bold bits, ignore the rest, nobody's grading you.

🚀 The big new toys

TikTok finally showed up! You can now point Gameplainer at TikTok and search by keyword, same as everything else. Results go straight to Discord or land in the web app for trend spotting, and posts embed cleanly in Discord using tnktok.com links so they actually render instead of sulking. Hashtag reach now shows up on the social analytics page too, so you can watch a sound blow up in real time and pretend you saw it coming. You totally saw it coming good job.

Steam Patches tab There's a dedicated tab for patch info now, auto-filled from your Steam patch notes. Shipped a sneaky hotfix you never wrote release notes for? You can add it back in manually! You can filter the whole thing by name or by origin, so "imported from Steam" and "I did this at midnight and told no one" stay neatly separated.

Bulk review export You can now download the bulk of your reviews straight out of Gameplainer. Got more than 500? It zips them up automatically instead of choking. Go forth: and pivot-table.

Team stuff got friendlier Invite a team-mate, and when they sign up with that email they'll get a gentle nudge about the invite waiting for them, so it stops vanishing into the inbox void. API keys are also shareable with your team now, right from the API settings screen. No more pasting keys into a Discord DM and hoping.

✨ Things that got better

The API grew up a bit It now serves Twitch stream data, lets you filter results by source type (Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and friends), and includes engagement metrics for Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, and Bluesky in the output. More numbers, fewer reasons to scrape it yourself.

Discord got chattier in the good way Channels pulling from several sources now get one rolled-up digest instead of a wall of separate pings. There's a new /settings slash command so you can edit your notification settings without leaving Discord. And Twitch embeds now show the proper detail: total views, video counts, the shape of things over time.

CSV exports respect your sort order If you sorted the reviews page a certain way, the export now matches it instead of quietly defaulting back to review date and ruining your afternoon.

Twitter boolean search actually knows it's boolean Searches using AND, OR, and parentheses are now correctly recognized as boolean instead of being taken weirdly literally.

🐛 Things we quietly fixed

Steam The 'Most recent review' date now shows correctly for freshly imported games, and review links on forums stopped mangling their formatting.

Meta and Xbox. Meta Quest reviews were exporting with scrambled data formats in CSVs. Fixed. Capsule art and recent reviews now display properly for Meta Quest and Xbox titles instead of showing up all blank and.. judgmental.

Steam Forums Weekly digests now send separate reports for forums and community, so you stop getting the same review report three times in a trench coat. In the web analysis - ownership stats now always refer to the main game only, so demo numbers stop sneaking in and lying to you. And the forum slash command now returns data for the timeframe you actually picked.

The general pile. You can dismiss web UI notifications again, and the streaming stats page no longer throws a rendering wobble when you load it. Also I fixed 487 bugs.

That's the lot. Back to the reviews!

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)