FAQ

What do the hearts mean?

The hearts answer one question: has this game aged well? Five hearts means everything we can see says it has. It's still loved, still played and still looked after. It is not a score for how good the game is. A brilliant game that people have drifted away from can have fewer hearts than an ordinary one that has held its audience for a decade.

We work it out every night from four things, each weighted:

• Player activity (45%). Average players over the last year against the year before, from SteamCharts. Every game loses players over time, so holding most of them counts as holding steady. A big audience counts in a game's favour even if it has shrunk. A sudden collapse, or an online-only game nobody is playing, counts against it.
• Recent reviews (25%). What Steam players have said in the last six months. A game with only a few recent reviews leans on its all-time rating instead.
• Since launch (15%). Whether people like it more or less than when it came out. A game that was always excellent and stayed that way counts as having aged as well as one that got better.
• Last updated (15%). When the developer last announced an update. A finished single-player game isn't marked down for not being patched. An online game left alone for years is.

Every game page shows its working under Has it aged?, so you can see why it got the hearts it did.

Why do new games have fewer hearts?

Because they haven't had time to show how they age. A new game is held near the middle (about three hearts) and moves towards its real score over its first couple of years. A well-reviewed launch usually starts at three or four hearts. It climbs if it holds up and drops if its players leave.

That's also why new games appear lower on our shelves. This site is about older games still worth playing, so a game that has proven itself over years ranks above one that hasn't had the chance yet.

Why does a game have no hearts?

We only score what we can measure, and we never fill a gap with a guess. A game with no Steam reviews or player counts we can use gets no hearts rather than a made-up middle score. If we can measure some things but not others, the hearts come from what we could measure, and the game page says what was missing.

What about review bombs?

Sometimes a game gets a sudden flood of negative reviews over something outside the game, like a publisher decision. When a month has several times the usual number of reviews and a sharp drop in how positive they are, we set that month aside and say so on the page. If people are still unhappy in the months after, those months count as normal.

What do GAME OVER and the Early Access label mean?

GAME OVER is set by a person, not by the numbers. We use it when a game has effectively ended, for example when its servers have shut. The game page gives the date and the reason.

EARLY ACCESS · NO UPDATE SINCE means Steam still lists the game as unfinished, but the developer hasn't announced an update for over a year. Those games get one heart at most.

Where does the data come from?

Reviews, release dates and update announcements come from Steam. Player counts come from SteamCharts. Everything is refreshed nightly. Games that aren't on Steam don't have hearts yet.

Spotted something that looks wrong? Tell us.