The Shape of Steam

A Canvas dot field of every Steam app (~129k dots), one per game, sorted by release date. Recolorable by release year, positive-review %, or current price. Hover for appid, year, reviews, price.

A 3D similarity map of every Steam app, projected with PaCMAP from tag vectors and rendered with Three.js. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom. Games with similar tag profiles cluster together.

A GitHub-contributions-style heatmap of every Steam release from 2003-09-12 to today, one cell per day, color = log10(count). Reveals Tuesday release spikes, Summer/Winter Sale dead zones, and the post-2017 release tsunami in one image.

A stacked-area streamgraph of every dated Steam release from 2003 to today, one band per primary tag. Reveals cultural waves — roguelike rise mid-2010s, deckbuilder spike post-2018, cozy/farming 2020–21 — as bands swelling in their era.

A tag-vs-year heatmap of how genre tags rise and fall over time. Rows = tags, sorted by peak year; color = the tag's share of that year's releases, normalized per-row. The diagonal cascade is the headline: Steam's tag vocabulary has drifted continuously.

A 4×3 grid of headline cards summarizing the whole catalog at a glance — total games, released vs coming-soon, review-attention totals, price/free split, English/controller/Deck reach, and the maker counts behind it all.

A beeswarm wall of review-percentage distributions per Steam tag. Each row is a tag; each dot is a game, x-positioned by review_percentage and sized by log review_count. Tags are sorted by score std-dev, so the most-polarized tags float to the top.

A baked-label heatmap of every Steam tag pair. Three metric variants — raw count, Jaccard, and lift — share one cluster ordering, so flipping between them lets you recognize the same co-occurrence blocks under each lens.

Strictly-filtered recent Steam games (since 2025-05-01, 150+ reviews, 80%+ positive) greedily grouped into ~30-game buckets, each keyed on a 1- or 2-tag combo. Each bucket renders as a Bootstrap section of capsule thumbnails.

A long vertical stack of beeswarm rows, one per Steam tag, showing the list-price distribution of the top 100 most-reviewed games in that tag along a shared sqrt x-axis. Rows are sorted by median price ascending — a ladder from cheapest tag to most expensive.

A 3D force-directed network of Steam developers and publishers, toggleable between bipartite (dev ↔ pub) and dev–dev projection (devs sharing a publisher). Communities detected via Louvain and colored categorically; hover shows top games.

One row per Steam tag, showing the dominant color palette of that tag's top-10 most-reviewed games. Header images are stitched together and run through ColorThief; swatches rendered in median-cut dominance order.

Same idea, but using screenshots instead of header art (3 games × 5 thumbnails each). A wider palette is extracted, then filtered by colorfulness (saturation × value) so chromatic accents aren't drowned by the universal beige/brown/black.

The first pass at per-tag color extraction — one row per tag, ten swatches, no colorfulness filter. Superseded by the header-colors and shot-colors versions, kept here for comparison.