How The Game Census is built
Measured numbers
Counted by the collection, not written by hand. A figure we cannot support is left out rather than shown as zero.
- Pages
- 55,555
- 1st of 6 measured in Entertainment, by sitemap URLs
- Page count over time
- 45,009 → 55,555 pages measured, 30 Sep to 25 Oct
- Languages
- English
- Deploys
- 9 in the last 30 days
- Last deploy 23 Oct 2026. From the public status feed
- llms.txt
- Published
- llms.txt 3.9 KB · llms-full.txt 12.7 KB
- Sitemap
- Listed in robots.txt
- Content last updated
- 25 Oct 2026
- As reported by the site itself
Tech and AI search
Read from the live site on 2026-10-23: its homepage, robots.txt and llms.txt. A line we could not read is left out.
- Built with
- Next.js
- Read from the homepage markup
- Structured data
- Dataset, Organization, WebSite
- schema.org types on the homepage
- AI crawler access
- Allows all 11 major AI crawlers
- From the site’s robots.txt
- llms.txt link depth
- 20 page links
- Markdown links in the site’s llms.txt
- Search
- Search box on the homepage
How it is built, by role
The same roles apply across the whole collection. Nothing in this block is specific to this site; what the site says about itself is quoted word for word below it.
- 1
Edge network
Visitors reach a site through an edge layer: a content delivery network with a web application firewall in front of it.
- 2
Application host
The edge talks to an application host that serves the site and renders its pages.
- 3
Data
What the pages show comes from a relational database or, for a site pre-rendered at build time, from data files built into its release.
- 4
Scheduled measurement
The collection measures its sites on a schedule: content dates and site health nightly, page counts read from each site’s sitemap weekly. Every reading is kept with its date. A site too large to re-walk is not re-measured, and shows no trend.
- 5
Public status feed
A monitoring panel sends a signed report on uptime, deploys and backups once a day, and the Operations page publishes it. A figure on this page that comes from that report says so.
In the site's own words
Each passage is copied unaltered from a page the site publishes, with the address it was taken from and the date we took it. We add nothing between them.
“Steam tells you how many people are playing a game right now — never how many were playing last month.”
“Pages exist only for games passing the data gate (profiled metadata plus >=10 reviews or live player tracking) — a missing page means insufficient data, not a missing game.”
“Inputs: live player samples (where tracked) and review velocity — new reviews in the most recent 8 complete weeks vs the prior 8, and vs the all-time peak week.”
“Total Steam reviews x an era-dependent multiplier range: released 2020+ -> 20-45x, 2014-2019 -> 25-60x, pre-2014 -> 40-80x.”
“Every verdict shows its working, every estimate is a labeled range with a documented method, and games without enough data get no page rather than a padded one.”
“The vital signs of every video game: live player counts, review momentum, cross-store prices, ownership estimates and evidence-backed health verdicts, recorded continuously across the entire Steam catalog.”
Screenshots
Timeline
45,009 → 55,555 pages measured, 30 Sep to 25 Oct
| Date | Pages |
|---|---|
| 2026-09-30 | 45,009 |
| 2026-10-10 | 49,574 |
| 2026-10-18 | 50,561 |
| 2026-10-25 | 55,555 |
- 30 Sep 202645,009 pages
- 10 Oct 202649,574 pages
- 18 Oct 202650,561 pages
- 25 Oct 202655,555 pages