Change Log

Recent platform updates and improvements

Smarter forum signals, nerdier Twitter search

April 29, 2026

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 😅

Improved Streaming and Review Insights

April 21, 2026

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.



Example of a word cloud from the game

Example of a word cloud from the game "Roadside Research"

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.
    A complete overview of a streamer view counts for a particular stream of the game Roadside Research
    A complete overview of a streamer view counts for a particular stream of the game Roadside Research

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.

Enhanced Twitch Integrations and Streamlined Steam Features

April 12, 2026

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.



Twitch - new Discord embeds now include a screenshot of the streamer

Twitch - new Discord embeds now include a screenshot of the streamer

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.



Review Station - now shows updates super clearly with colors - red (deleted) green (added)

Review Station - now shows updates super clearly with colors - red (deleted) green (added)

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.

Enhanced Review Search and Stream Analytics

March 27, 2026

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.



Review Station - new search features

Review Station - new search features

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.



Social Overview - now with trend lines

Social Overview - now with trend lines

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 😅

Introducing New Social Stats and Enhanced Review Visuals

March 21, 2026

Social Overview page

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)

Heck yeah I added Teams!

March 14, 2026

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 Station - Audience Overlap

    Review Station - Audience Overlap

  • 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

Steam Forums Overhaul & Enhanced Reddit/Google Alerts

March 03, 2026

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



Gameplainer's new Steam Forum home page

Gameplainer's new Steam Forum home page

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.

Enhanced Steam Forum Monitoring and Improved Search Setup

February 25, 2026

🚀 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.

Enhanced Review Filtering and Exporting

February 20, 2026

🚀 New Features

YouTube

  • Automatically find videos tagged to a 'game' channel by entering the channel_id in the forum setup.

✨ Enhancements

Reviews

  • Users can now filter reviews by the number of hours a player has played a game since they reviewed it.
  • A new dedicated form on the reviews page allows searching for reviews by a specific user.
  • Extended review filters to automatically query the database on change, removing the need to click 'search'.
  • Filter reviews to show players who have played any amount of time since reviewing, not just specific hour bands.
  • Review analytics now have a separate tab, making it easier to dive deep into reviews and overall analytics.

🐛 Bug Fixes

Reviews

  • Fixed an issue where review updates wouldn't show if a user posted a forum post with just an emoji or punctuation.

Shiny New Features for Steam Reviews and More!

February 16, 2026

🚀 New Features

Steam Reviews

  • A new word cloud feature visualizes the top 50 words from your reviews, helping you understand common themes and feedback.
  • Users can customize their word cloud by removing words they don't want (or.. add removed words back!)
  • The word cloud supports multiple languages including English, Russian, German, French, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, and Norwegian. Hoping to add Chinese, Japanese and Korean soon!

✨ Enhancements

Steam Forums

  • The forum page now includes overall forum stats, making it easier to gauge forum activity at a glance.
  • Review activity charts for Steam will no longer display the 'last 3 months' chart if there isn't any new data from the last week, ensuring more relevant insights.

Review Reports

  • Sentiment reports now feature actionable examples, showcasing reviews that clearly demonstrate suggested improvements or issues.
  • Expanded the list of excluded words for the word cloud in various languages such as German, French, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, and Polish.

Discord

  • Categories created by Gameplainer are now private by default, aligning with the privacy settings of channels.

🐛 Bug Fixes

Steam Reviews

  • Fixed an issue where Oculus Rift reviews were not being imported correctly. Apparently no one noticed because there haven't been any Oculus Rift reviews 😅
  • Resolved a bug preventing review translations from the gameplainer.com/reviews page.
  • Corrected links leading to Steam review sentiment reports.

Twitter (X)

  • Fixed incorrectly named labels on reach graphs.

Discord

  • Removed a block on sending messages that affected notifications if multiple users followed the same game.

Twitch

  • Fixed a bug where only one user was notified when multiple users followed the same game during a stream.

Blog

  • Fixed an issue with blog titles being improperly escaped, ensuring correct display of characters.