I see, thanks for your opinion, I will definitely take that into account. I also find Criticker not that useful, although I have less rates than you have (around 400 rated things). And as you, I also believe that trying to compare me to other people to find “commons” - it’s not the best ways ot do recommendations.

Thanks again for that 3-4-3 system, I started doing my research yesterday, pretty sure it will end up implemented in Gamescovery until the beta.

Hi, I see, hopefully you will be willing to participate in further testing (for example, in beta) when the project is in better shape.

The only reason I bring the current alpha to the public is to test the concept and see if people are interested in it at all. I spent around 1 year (1 year of time, not of working hours) to make the current alpha, and there is no sense in spending one more year on a project nobody actually wants. For now, feedback was somewhat positive, so I want to continue and see what I will build next.

The main idea of my recommendation algorithm is to calculate the unique test for every user. It doesn’t and wouldn’t compare the tastes of different users to calculate assumptions. I hate this, and those kinds of recommendation algorithms seem to never work for me. When doing my research on the beginning of the project, I found that such algorithms were first used for social media, but I don’t feel these algorithms are correct (as I feel it, I can’t prove this with real numbers for now).

So, hopefully, Gamescovery recommendation algorithms wouldn’t have biases like "well everyone likes X so X”, since it never tries to compare 2 or more users. Besides that, Gamescovery will allow users to tweak the algorithm so that users can actually customize it to make the algorithm better for them. That doesn’t mean users will be able to completely change the behavior of the algorithm, but rather direct it in a direction they want.

I’m thinking about using game database sites like https://rawg.io/, but I need to plan things and compare pros and cons before doing this.

Hi, thanks for the idea.

From my point of view, it’s not that complex to grab data from game stores and put it into my database. For services without insane rate limiting, I can pull 100k games in a few hours. Storing all the needed data is also not a problem.

The biggest problem with game data for now is to distill it and calculate differences, and this is what takes the most time and computing resources. Currently, Gamescovery DB has 70k+ games from itch.io and I spend a lot of time filtering it than on grabbing data from itch.io (originally, I grabbed around 100k games from itch.io).

So, when the right time comes, Gamescovery will have games from Steam without any complex hacks. I’m not sure about GOG and EGS, didn’t check that.

eg the modern 6/10=bad syndrome

I also saw a solution for normalizing the scores of every person to battle this bias. This is used in Criticker system (recommendation for movies):

https://www.criticker.com/critickers-algorithm-explained/

Once you've got enough ratings, Criticker normalizes your scores. We do this because of the wide variety in the way people rate things. For some people, a score of "80" is close to a masterpiece, while for others "80" is middling. Some try to spread their scores equally across the whole scale, while others adhere to the system they learned in school, when a "60" was real bad. Like, if you came home with a "60" on your math test, you were probably going to get grounded.

Currently, I’m investigating if this is something my recommendation algorithm needs, some maybe I will implement some kind of normalization for scores on Gamescovery, we will see.

Hi, thanks very much for this feedback, love it ❤️

I never heard about backloggd.com, but it’s a good long-term thinking from you, that if the project survives to a stage where it has a big userbase, it’s a good idea to have compatibility or “plugins” with other trackers and data sources.

I also like your idea with the rating scale, I will definitely think about implementing your idea or some variation of it.

Yeah, it would be stupid to lock the project inside of itch.io games only. I started from itch.io and indie games for a few reasons:

• I would like Gamescovery to bring value for indie games community, so authors, who have no money for an advertisement campaign, have more chances for a bigger player base.
• itch.io data is very chaotic. So I decided that if my system can classify and correctly recommend itch.io games, it would definitely have no problems with better data, like from Steam.

In the future, I definitely plan to support all popular PC game stores in the following order:

• GOG
• Steam
• Epic

I also think about the support of the consoles, but this will be in the rather distant future.

I have one more question, if you don’t mind - what is your feeling about game recommendations after you rated 3-4 games? Were recommendations lean towards predicable “correct” way, or were they completely random and off?

Why is this necessary at all?

I need the user to have an account so I know who rated what games and who requested what recommendations. To do that, I need to build a system on my webpage for users to be able create a new account, so I need to store their credentials, which I don’t want to do. Or I can use an already existing account from the game store.

Connecting my account to your site gives you access to large amounts of personal information, even if you’re not using it.

I don’t think that’s true. Or at least this is true if you allow that. When you try to log in with your itch.io account onthe Gamescovery page, they will tell you what data will be accessible to me. See the following screenshot as example:

Because it’s easier for me to ask game stores for an account than to build an authentication and validation system by myself.

Most of the game stores has official way that allows me to use an account, registered on their platform, in the Gamescovery app, for authentication reasons.

Since I don’t need to store any user data besides rated and recommended games, it’s a win situation for me, because:

• Your personal data, login, email, password, etc., are stored on the servers of the game store, so I don’t need to worry about securing this data and other legal stuff.
• Game store already validated your account, so I don’t need to build a defence system to protect Gamescovery from bots.
• Most gamers already have an account in one or more popular game stores, so they don’t need to register one more.

It’s the same mechanism when you go to any new webpage/app and they propose to use your existing Google/Apple account instead of creating a new one.

So yeah, answering your question “why do you need to connect your game store account on Gamescovery?” - the answer is “to save money and development time”.

Well, currently, you must enter every game you played manually. I don’t read games from users’ account because I don’t want to deal with private data for now. I only ask the game store that the user chose to give me the user avatar and public name, and confirm that “yes, this user is registered on our platform and account valid”.

After that, I use id that the store gave me to connect you to what games you manually rated on Gamescovery and what games were recommended to you by Gamescovery.

Thanks for the clarification.

Yes, I agree that the project should have something more than just Discord. I just thought Discord is quite popular among gamers. I will think about Matrix or Lemmy in the future.

About the account - well, I need an account to be able to record what games you rated and what recommendations you currently have. Otherwise, I have no idea for now how I can show correct data to correct people. I decided to allow people to register with game store accounts because that’s easier for me to implement.

Theoretically, I can allow users to be in the “offline” mode, so all their data is stored locally. Data will be lost if you, well, remove it by yourself, or your computer drive dies. The only note is that the recommendation algorithm is not open-source, so you still need to send your data to the server to get new recommendations…

Anyway, thanks for the idea, I will think about it 👍

Hi, can you please elaborate?

without an account - do you mean without itch.io account (Steam, Epic, GOG etc. in the future)? If yes - would you prefer to register a new account on the Gamescovery webpage that is specific to Gamescovery?

without Discord - do you mean that you don’t like Discord and would like to communicate with developers/users on another platform? If yes - what platform suits you best in your opinion?