Finding indie games worth playing

Storefronts are built to sell you the game you are already looking at. What I wanted was the opposite: a flat page of everything new, scored honestly, where I can tell in about four seconds whether a game is worth another minute of my attention.

The pipeline pulls popular-new, popular-upcoming, newest, free and fresh demos from Steam — all Indie-tagged — then fills each one in from the details and reviews endpoints: the official trailer, screenshots, whether there is a demo, the review percentage and how many reviews it is based on. GOG's public catalogue API adds the DRM-free side. Everything is cached, so a warm run takes about a minute.

Two decisions did most of the work. The first is scoring games Rotten-Tomatoes style from player reviews rather than showing a raw star average, because a 91% from 393,000 reviews and a 91% from nine reviews are not the same claim.

The second is the video. Every card has the official trailer, which is marketing, and — where one exists — a no-commentary gameplay clip, which is not. A trailer tells you what the game wants to be; two minutes of somebody quietly playing it tells you what it is. Having both one click apart is the entire reason the page is useful to me.

It is a static page over a JSON file, which means it goes stale on its own: the data is only as fresh as the last time I ran the pipeline. That is the honest cost of not running a server, and for a page I open when I am bored, it is the right trade.