• 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!

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!

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.

The thread tying most of this week's report together is regional sentiment. English-speaking audiences are forgiving launch-week issues that Chinese and Russian audiences aren't. Same games, different scores, gaps wider than I've seen in any week of monitoring so far.
Also worth flagging before we get into it: three reviews flipped from Not Recommended to Recommended this week across two different games after direct developer responses. That's the highest dev-reply impact rate I've seen in a single week. There's a counter-story here too (Outbound's most-upvoted review accuses the dev team of pressuring players to change reviews), but the pattern is still there.

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.

The most reviewed game this week was Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era, the highest rated entry in the franchise since 2008. The next top games of the week had stories of their own, including review-bombing, hotfix triage, a $4 sledding game outscoring nearly everyone, and a librarian game with the most engaged dev forum presence of the week.

I spent most of this weekend playing the 9th most reviewed game of the week - Forbidden Solitaire , an almost impossible to put down weird delight of a game that somehow ties together narrative, a meta-narrative and an ever changing rouge-like Solitaire game? Perfectly executed, well done to Grey Alien Games.

And.. here's this week's stats!

• 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 😅

Three of this week's top five games released yesterday which makes the numbers even more striking. In every case, the majority of people already discussing those games in the forums hadn't bought them yet.
Across all five games this week, forum ownership ranges from 17.8% to 52.8%. For some that's fine: Far Far West launched yesterday with Damian from Fireshine Games having spent months building a forum community, and 94% of those forum reviewers went positive. For others it's a warning: '83 launched into a "Player count is extremely concerning" thread dominated by non-owners, with zero developer replies across 303 threads. The Steam Forums are where your reputation gets made before your game even launches, and this week the data makes that unusually visible.

Oh, and Capcom released PRAGMATA to 97% positive from over 22 thousand reviews. Not a bad week!

• 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.

This week's report was worth the wait though! The top five reviewed games have some super interesting stories hiding underneath their headline score:

• A solo Finnish developer with a 99% score from his home country and a 65% from Russia - and the explanation isn't what you'd expect
• A free-to-play MMO that launched to a 22% score because half its players couldn't log in
• A visually stunning cyberpunk game two days into its launch with a fault line already forming along language lines
• A debut studio whose demo outperformed its full release
• And a developer posting in 40% of their own bug threads while the score stays stubbornly flat

Let's dive in!

• 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.

RACCOIN: Coin Pusher Roguelike launched with one of the more interesting Steam Forums I've seen - eight dedicated Steam forum sections, feedback boards for demos going back to August 2025, and a developer who is the most active poster in their own community by a wide margin. Nearly 90% of forum users who reviewed went positive. That's not a coincidence but the result of months of groundwork.

The pattern holds with Cinderia and their three developers in its top five forum posters and a 35% thread response rate. Chinese players are specifically citing the update cadence in positive reviews. On the flip side though this weeks most reviewed game Weeping Swan has 2,399 reviews and just two replies from the team.

Let's dive in!

It looked like a rough start to a long recovery, though the data two weeks later tells a different story.

As of now Crimson Desert has a total of 107,766 reviews, and is sitting 82.5% positive overall. Chinese sentiment up from 42.6% to 69.2%. Korean from 44.7% to 75.4%. English from 75.4% to 85.8%.

4,609 reviews flipped from negative to positive. The game that launched into "Mixed" territory is now tracking toward a full recovery across every major market.

While developers didn't head into the Steam forums to start making the recovery - they respond directly to 2,622 individual Steam reviews: 2,060 of them in Chinese, and the rest in English or Korean. Of the 4,609 reviews that flipped negative to positive, 994 Chinese flips came after a direct developer response. The ratio is striking: they responded to Chinese reviews at roughly fourteen times the rate of English ones, in a market that was their biggest problem, and it moved the needle measurably.

The "Flipped after dev response" filter in Gameplainer makes this visible in a way that raw review scores can't. Filtering by language, then by flipped reviews, then by dev response, you can see exactly where the recovery happened and what drove it. 994 Chinese reviews flipping positive after a direct response isn't a coincidence. It's a strategy.

My forum thesis ("Showing up in your community == better review sentiment") holds up across most of the data I track, but Crimson complicates it in a useful way. Forums are one channel, direct responses to reviews are another. Pearl Abyss chose the later (at a pretty intense scale) in the language that mattered most - while patching the game almost daily in the background.

The recovery data suggests Pearl Abyss understood something about where their audience actually was, and went there directly.

The story running through the data is familiar but unusually clean this week. The developers who showed up in their forums converted players into positive reviewers. EverSiege has two developers sitting at the top of their own forum poster rankings and a 26.4% thread response rate. AI LIMIT's DLC community is active and well-tended, with 84.8% of forum users who reviewed going positive. Eastern Era's team is posting daily updates and players are citing that goodwill explicitly in reviews, even as the bug load tests their patience.
And then there's Life is Strange: Reunion, which is a different kind of story entirely. Nearly one in four positive reviews references the previous entry in the series. The fanbase didn't leave - they just needed a reason to come back, and this week they found one.

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 😅

Dragonkin's developer was the second most active poster in their own community and hit 75% positive forum conversion (people who posted in the forums and then reviewed the game). Death Stranding 2 had modest but real presence and hit 94.7%. Crimson Desert had 7,656 forum posters and replied to none of them. The Seven Deadly Sins: Origin's one logged team reply was a Valve employee shutting down an argument.

Three of this week's top five games launched on Monday or Wednesday, deliberately ahead of the Spring Sale that kicked off on Thursday.

The other story running through this week is optimization. Death Stranding 2 is getting praised specifically for how well it runs on PC, in the same week that four other games are taking hits for crashes, stuttering, and servers that won't stay up. During a sale, performance isn't just a technical issue. It's a conversion issue.

• 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)

This week's data makes the case better than most. Toxic Commando's developers were in the bug report trenches all week and players who talked with them reviewed positively at nearly 90%. Capcom posted nothing across 500+ Monster Hunter Stories 3 threads and nearly 4,000 posts. Fatal Frame II's most engaged forum users were its most disappointed. Three games, three different approaches, three very different outcomes.

Chinese players were the most critical market across three of the five games. In Toxic Commando's case, a timezone mismatch turned a launch day frustration into the most upvoted review of the week (and it was negative! 😭). In MH Stories 3 and Solasta II, the gaps are wide enough to be worth paying attention to.

And then there's Lucid Blocks. No big studio, no forum drama. Except there was one Russian YouTuber. 28% of the game's review base is Russian and six percent of Russian reviews mention the same YouTuber by name. At 96% positive with an active developer and a 95% steam-forum-to-positive-review conversion, it's the cleanest launch story of the week by a distance.

Let's dive in to the top five!

• 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

Marathon's 89% overall score conceals a 30-point gap: English players sit at 91.3%, Chinese players at 61.0%. Slay the Spire 2 has a cleaner number - 96.7%, and above 88% in every language - but the "is this a sequel or a DLC?" debate is almost entirely absent from English reviews and loudest everywhere else.

Russian, Korean, and Chinese players are the ones pushing back.

The English score is not the whole picture. This week it's actively obscuring it.

Both games share something else. Neither MegaCrit nor Bungie posted once to their Steam forums this week. The only developer activity on either page was Valve moderators closing threads. Two of the week's biggest launches, tens of thousands of reviews, and the loudest voice in both forums was a Valve employee telling people to stop arguing.

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.

Resident Evil Requiem dropped during Next Fest week and absolutely steamrolled everything else, pulling over 90% of all Steam Reviews for the week (over 63k!) and getting a positive score of 95.9%.

It barely needs analysis: it's Resident Evil Requiem is great and everyone knows it.

But that's not what this week's report is about.

Steam Next Fest ran Feb 23 through March 2, giving players the chance to try thousands of demos before their full releases. Not all demos on Next Fest are open to reviews - that's a choice developers make when pushing their demos live. Of the 1,854 demos that did collect reviews this week, 30,400 reviews came in total.

This report covers the top 5 most reviewed demos of the fest, and what the data says about each of them.

One thing worth noting upfront: if you released a full game this week that wasn't Resident Evil, you had a very bad time. Next Fest dominates player attention. The data shows it clearly.

Gameplainer also tracked Twitch streaming activity across all five demos during Next Fest. Windrose led on Twitch too, with 54,088 peak viewers across 1,391 streams. Two large French streamers drove the March 1 spike, but the long tail of smaller streamers covering it throughout the week suggests genuine broader interest beyond a single placement.

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.

Up until yesterday I'd only been tracking full releases - I nearly had to rub my eyes when I realised a DLC had taken the top spot.

Looking at the previous four chapters of Poppy Playtime, the pattern is consistent though: each one delivered super strong opening weekend numbers. If you're building episodic or DLC-driven content, Poppy Playtime is the benchmark to watch.

Excluding Poppy, the rest of the week was remarkably tight. Positions 2 and 3 were separated by fewer than 10 reviews, and #4 wasn't far behind.

That #4 spot belongs to Super Battle Golf with 1,123 reviews at 96.6% positive. Worth calling out: this is published by Oro Interactive , a small team of four who also published last week's #9 Roadside Research , and developed by Brimstone , a remote studio spread across Europe and South East Asia.

Back-to-back weeks in the roundup for Oro is no accident. They're cooking!

At the other end, NORSE: Oath of Blood collected 1,499 reviews but sits at just 50.2% positive overall, with Chinese-speaking players at only 30.5%. That's a significant regional gap, and the kind of signal worth acting on fast before it compounds.

Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown held 75.3% positive, English-audience driven. Might & Magic Fates - Heroes TCG hit sits at 53% positive, with mixed feedback from all markets.

Release volume was down last week with demos dropping from 671 to 472, and paid releases from 512 to 477. This is due to Steam Next Fest starting today, running through to March 3rd. Developers were holding their demos back for the launch window rather than releasing early. By next week's report, expect that demo bar to be significantly taller.

On with the top 5 break down!

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.

That's not just a successful launch - that's a fanbase that had been waiting years that showed up in force.

The number of demos shipped continued to rise this week, leading up to next week's Steam Next Fest. I'm really keen to see how they go. There are already a couple of demos released this week that have garnered a whole bunch of reviews - including the delightfully weird Antivirus Survivors 2003 Professional Demo with 98% positive rating and Ranger's Path: National Park Simulator with 115 reviews at 80% positive.

A personal note: Roadside Research

Coming in at #9 this week was Roadside Research , with 580 reviews and an 87% positive score. I'll be upfront: I worked alongside the small Belgian team behind it, so I'm biased.

But I'll let the forum data speak for itself - the lead devs and publisher Oro has been watching the forums and their Discord server like hawks, having responded to two out of every three threads on the forums, with a team response rate of 62.3% - easily the highest I have seen since I started studying Steam forums.

While you read the top 5 games of the week analysis below, keep that 62.3% team response rate in the back of your mind.

The Roadside Research release also put scale into perspective. 580 reviews on launch weekend already represents intense, real-time feedback to manage. Mewgenics hit thirty times that at 17,449 reviews.

I can only imagine what that firehose looks like from the developer's side.

On with the top 5.

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.

This week's data shows exactly how this plays out at scale, and there's a lesson here for anyone managing a community on Steam.

This week saw 1045 games collect 24,397 reviews (with 668 games getting absolutely zero). We'll dig into the top 5 performers and explore an interesting pattern emerging in how players interact with forums versus reviews (especially when you've got 18,000 posts in a month!)

Oh, and demos are taking over: they jumped from 31% of all Steam releases just two weeks ago to 40% this week (414/1045) as developers gear up for this months' Next Fest.

Let's see if this trend holds for the next two weeks.

The standout title, Nioh 3, collected 5,625 reviews with an 83.15% positive score. Solid, but short of the coveted 90% mark. Chinese players contributed nearly half of all feedback but rated it lower (80.5%) than English speakers (84.6%).

Meanwhile, SIFU Kidnapped! Adventure in the Women's Kingdom absolutely crushed it with 98.27% positive from 982 reviews- almost entirely from Chinese players (96.1%). English speakers? Just 6 reviews. Talk about knowing your audience.

On the opposite end, PUBG: BLINDSPOT limped in at 65.73% positive, with Russian (48.3%) and Korean (50.9%) players being particularly harsh in their assessments.

.. and boy did the community have some depressing reviews, with only 38% of reviews recommending Highguard..

Notably, reviews from Russian players were particularly harsh, landing a mere 19% positive score.

On the other end of the spectrum, the incredible sci-fi rock climbing game Cairn (from the developers of Furi and Haven) captivated players with a stellar 94% positive review rate, showcasing that engaging gameplay can shine through even in a crowded market.

Let's read on to see the top five reviewed new releases for the week!

From Real-Time to Long-Term Insights

Previously, Gameplainer focused on the moment.. alerting you immediately when content went live. But what happened to that data? It disappeared into the Discord void.

Not anymore!

Now every video and stream is tracked, stored, and analyzed to show you trends over time. Want to see if your game's YouTube presence is growing? Curious whether that big streamer event had lasting impact? It's all here.

YouTube Analytics: The Complete Picture

Flexible Time Ranges

Track your game's video performance across multiple time periods:
- Last 7 Days
- 1 Month

- 3 Months
- 6 Months
- All Time

At a glance, you'll see:
- Total Videos - How many videos have been created, with percentage change over the last 30 days
- Total Views - Cumulative view count across all videos
- Average Views per Video - Helping you understand typical reach
- Last 30 Days Performance - Recent video count and view totals

Monthly Trend Visualization

The Views Per Month chart shows both video count (blue line) and total views (red bars) on a single graph. This lets you spot patterns immediately:
- Are creators losing interest even as views increase?
- Did a spike in videos correlate with a spike in views?
- Are you seeing seasonal patterns in content creation?

Creator & Video Rankings

Gameplainer surfaces the videos and creators that matter most:

Top 10 Most Viewed Videos - Which individual videos drove the most eyeballs to your game?

Top 10 Creators by Total Views - Who are your most impactful content partners, measured by cumulative reach?

Top 10 Most Prolific Creators - Which creators are producing the most content about your game?

Recent High Performers - Fresh videos that are punching above their weight in views

Twitch Streaming Analytics: Know Your Streamers

Stream Performance Metrics

Track streaming activity with the same flexible time ranges:
- Total Streams - How many times your game has been streamed
- Total Hours Streamed - Raw airtime your game has received

- Peak Viewers (Total) - Maximum concurrent viewers across all streams, with average per stream
- Last 30 Days Activity - Recent stream count and peak viewer totals

Monthly Streaming Activity

The activity chart displays both peak viewers (purple bars) and stream count (blue line), revealing:
- Whether viewership is concentrated in a few big streams or distributed across many
- Growth or decline in streaming interest
- Impact of updates, launches, or marketing pushes

Streamer Leaderboards

Top 10 Streams by Peak Viewers - Which individual streams had the biggest audience? Includes:
- Streamer name and channel
- Peak concurrent viewers
- Stream duration
- Date of stream

Top 10 Streamers by Total Peak Viewers - Who are your most valuable streaming partners? Shows:
- Total viewership across all their streams
- Number of streams
- Average peak viewers per stream
- Quick link to their channel

The difference between these two views is crucial: one streamer might have one massive stream, while another consistently delivers solid viewership across many streams. Both matter, but in different ways.

Export Everything

Every analytics view includes an Export CSV button, so you can pull the data into your own tools, share with stakeholders, or archive for future comparison.

What This Means for Your Game

These analytics answer questions you couldn't answer before:

• "Our last update was 3 months ago - did video coverage decline?"
• "We sponsored a big streamer last month - did it spark more organic streaming?"
• "Which creators should we prioritize for review codes?"
• "Is our game's content trending up or down?"

You get the real-time Discord notifications you rely on, plus the historical context to make informed decisions about your marketing, updates, and community engagement.

Try It Out

Historical analytics are available now for all Gameplainer users. Log in and check out your YouTube and Twitch analytics pages to see what stories your data tells.

As always, we're tracking everything in real-time while building this historical view, so even if you just signed up today, you'll start building a rich analytics timeline immediately.

Want to see how your game performs across YouTube, Twitch, Steam reviews, Reddit discussions, and more? Start your Gameplainer trial today and get the complete picture of your community.

• Change Log Visibility: You can now view the entire change log directly on the main page without any extra clicks. Just visit our change log to see all updates at a glance.
• Discord Updates: Stay informed with the latest changes as they are now communicated directly to the 'Updates' channel in our Gameplainer Discord Server. Join the conversation and never miss an important update!

• Revamped the Gameplainer documentation for mobile users, providing a more user-friendly and responsive experience.
• Made the entire page more functional and accessible for easier navigation.

User Signup & Server Sync

• Fixed an issue that prevented users from signing up if they had no servers
• Discord Servers are better synced with Gameplainer. Now channels are updated here when you update them there!

• Daily and Weekly Digests: Steam reviews now have daily and weekly digests enabled for all users, keeping you updated effortlessly.
• Discord Channel Overhaul: Improved dropdown for selecting Discord channels, making it easier to manage your settings.

User Experience Improvements

• Timezone Management: Easily set your user timezone and view result logs in your local time.
• Improved Filtering: Enhanced filtering capabilities for forum monitoring tools, helping you find relevant data more efficiently.
• Clearer Messaging: Updates to messaging throughout the platform for a better understanding of actions and statuses.
• Smoother Navigation: Cleaned up the settings page for a more intuitive user experience.

Bug Fixes

• Prevent Crashes: Fixed issues that could cause crashes when viewing forums for deleted users.
• Streamlined Updates: Resolved problems with refreshing data for games taken down from Steam, ensuring timely updates.

These updates are designed to provide you with a more streamlined and enjoyable experience while using Gameplainer! 🎮

• Recommendation changes - When a Steam review switches from positive to negative (or vice versa)
• Score adjustments - Meta Quest reviews that move up or down the rating scale
• Deletions - Steam reviews that get removed, whether by the player or moderators
• Content updates - When players rewrite or substantially edit their feedback

Every change is timestamped and preserved, giving you a complete history of how sentiment evolves over time.

Filtering for what matters

Raw review data is overwhelming. Gameplainer Reviews' filtering system helps you focus on the reviews that need attention:

Flip Filter - Show only reviews where the recommendation or score changed. This quickly reveals patterns: Did a recent patch cause sentiment shifts? Are players changing their minds after more playtime?

Developer Response Filter - Separate reviews you've already addressed from ones still waiting for a reply. No more accidentally responding twice or overlooking feedback.

Suggested Replies Filter - Gameplainer analyzes review content, sentiment, and player engagement to recommend which reviews would benefit most from a developer response. Not every review needs a reply; this filter shows you the ones that do.

AI-assisted responses

Writing personalized responses to dozens of reviews takes time you don't have. Gameplainer Reviews' AI generator creates contextual replies based on the review content, which you can then adjust:

• Tone slider - Make responses warmer or more matter-of-fact
• Voice switch - Choose between personal ("I appreciate your feedback") or company voice ("We appreciate your feedback")
• Edit and send - Refine the generated response before posting, or use it as a starting point

The AI understands context: it won't suggest a cheerful response to a frustrated player reporting a game-breaking bug.

Why deleted reviews matter

When negative reviews disappear from Steam, it's worth knowing why. Did the player remove it after your patch fixed their issue? Was it flagged as off-topic? Gameplainer Reviews preserves deleted reviews so you can:

• Track whether fixes are working (players removing complaints)
• Identify review bombing attempts that get moderated
• Maintain a complete record of all feedback, even what's no longer public

Getting started

Gameplainer Reviews is available now for all Gameplainer users tracking Steam or Meta Quest games. Reviews are imported automatically - no configuration needed. The system runs continuously in the background, checking for changes and flagging updates as they happen.

It's been a while between blog posts, but there's been a bunch happening in the background.

A few months ago I started putting all my updates into an official Gameplainer Discord Server - Come and say hi!

New features

• Steam RSS Feeds can now been imported - this is super useful for importing Events and announcements directly into Discord.
• Drastically reduced permissions - I went through the entire app to make sure Gameplainer didn't over extend itself where ever possible. Gameplainer no longer needs Administrator access to your Discords, just access to create channels, and send messages.

Bug fixes

• Reddit integration is back - easily search for mentions of your game in posts or comments, retrieve in near-real-time all posts on a particular post (great for AMA's or trailer reveals etc) or posts by a particular user.
• Lots of fixes to Meta Quest reviews, Steam reviews, and Steam Forums

Don't forget to come say hi on the official Gameplainer Discord server here !

Cheers,

Chris