In short, what's new on GameSieve:
- Game pages have been added, with detailed information about each game.
- Game pages contain a zoomable (pinch / ctrl-scroll) price history graph.
- WIP: The price history graph also shows price history for equivalent previous products, annotated with information about what changed (where applicable). (example: X4: Community of Planets Collector's Edition)
- Game pages contain a price matrix to show prices across all tracked countries and currencies at a glance (displayed previous lows depend on the current currency selection).
- For registered users: The game page offers another place where you can manage your hidelist / wishlist priorities / library status. On here, it works without JavaScript, finally giving non-JS users access to all available functionality again.
- The URL format for game pages is identical to that on GOG. Just change e.g. https://www.gog.com/en/game/dex to https://gamesieve.com/en/game/dex (the "/en/" e.a. language code can be left in; it will automatically be stripped, or if possible converted to the relevant country).
Wait, what was GameSieve again?
GameSieve is my independent GOG-only game discovery service, search engine and price tracker - basically a better way to explore GOG's catalog. It preferentially bubbles up new and improved deals, rather than the same old 95% discounts you see during each sale, and is highly customizable with personalized filtering defaults. For registered users, it adds a hidelist, wishlist priorities, and automatic correction for games which GOG doesn't recognize that you own (i.e. all those Amazon freebies which differ from the equivalent store products).
Okay, cool, so about that game page?
When I started GameSieve, I purposefully didn't try to duplicate functionality which already exists on GOGDB, wanting to be a complement rather than a competitor. Creating a useful filtering setup with multi-currency tracking was quite enough of a challenge in itself, and I believed (and still believe) that most of the time, you're just interested in knowing if a game on sale is at its all-time best or even improved in price. However, sometimes you're interested in a specific game which is not at its all-time low, and then you want to dig deeper into its price history to get a better feel for how the price evolved over time.
Price history graphs are extremely useful for this, but I've felt that existing ones have been somewhat lacking, and rather ... clunky.
The other thing which I've been focusing on is data quality and enriching: Grouping games together with their expansions, editions and so on, classifying and correcting things at an additional level of detail (e.g. distinguishing between installable expansions and goodie packs). I have heuristics for this so that if the "basic" version of a game gets removed from the store, with another one added, relevant expansions/editions get automatically re-linked to that new version. And I realized that using this setup, I should be able to create a price history graph of not just the current version of a game, but also all previous versions for which I have pricing information.
Together with some other improvements in functionality (hoverable price "ranges" rather than price-change "points", plus giving the graph full-width space and making it easily zoomable), and filling in pricing information where GOGDB had gaps due to various historical bugs, this felt big enough to be worth implementing. And then of course when I had a page to display such a graph, it only made sense to put all other useful information about each game on there. Right now this doesn't really add too much above what GOG displays on their game pages - besides the price tracking, I think only the (corrected) release date on GOG, content ratings for other regions, plus consistent linking to related products? - but I'm already planning to extend this with various other types of information which I hadn't been collecting before, as I had nowhere to put it.
What's with the "WIP" for annotations?
I have written a lot of tooling for correcting and enriching game information, but during implementation, I discovered none of it is actually quite suitable for identifying and linking the correct previous products. Also, figuring out exactly what changed, and why, is a quite labor-intensive process. Everything else about the game page was ready to go, so I decided to just put the game pages live now, and continue working on the annotations over the coming weeks.
What is coming next?
Probably lots of small new additions which I'm not yet thinking of; keep an eye on the changelog over in r/gamesieve where I'll add them as they're released.
The big one, though: In the last two months, GOG added support for another 10 currencies, and more are undoubtedly coming. This means my current setup for collecting pricing information is no longer fit for purpose - my simplistic approach just takes too long for so many countries. I have been collecting pricing information for these new countries, so when I add them to the front-end, I'll have pricing history nearly from the start for each currency - but first I'm going to have to rewrite that entire part of the setup. I have some ideas on how to do this which feel hopeful, but it's probably going to take quite a while.
GameSieve
