Sources and methodology

• Players online: Steam Web API, ISteamUserStats/GetNumberOfCurrentPlayers (only games on Steam). The figure shown comes from the latest update and always shows its time (UTC). History, records, the daily ranking and day-to-day comparisons use only the 05:00 UTC reading: one a day, the first update completed between 04:45 and 07:59 UTC (the time shown is when data collection finished). A later update in the same window only fills in the games that were missing, and for those games its time is shown. Updates at other times do not enter the history; if the 05:00 reading is missing on a given day, that day has no value.
• Achievements: Steam Web API, ISteamUserStats/GetGlobalAchievementPercentagesForApp (unlock percentage out of all Steam players, no key). The full list stays in the data. On the page, names and icons come from GetSchemaForGame when a Steam key is configured; hidden achievements are shown as “Hidden achievement”, without a description. Without local names the section is not shown.
• List of the most played games: Steam ISteamChartsService/GetMostPlayedGames plus a selection of popular titles.
• Descriptions, genres, developers, prices (Italy) and covers: Steam Store API (appdetails, Italian language) and the Steam CDN.
• Abnormal spikes of negative reviews (“review bombing”): Steam's public reviews API (appreviews, all languages and all purchase types, including periods Steam flags as “off-topic review activity”), daily counts in UTC updated once a day. A day is a spike only if there are at least 50 negative reviews, at least three times the median of the previous 28 days and above the “median + 5 × MAD” threshold, if the share of negative reviews rises by at least 20 points and exceeds half, and if positive reviews do not grow in the same way (so launches, updates and sales do not count). The “without the spike” score removes all reviews from the spike days. The full method is explained in the “Steam reviews: abnormal spikes” section of every game page.
• Deals and lowest price: public Steam Store API (appdetails with price_overview, Italy, euros, no key). The “lowest seen by Statcade” is the lowest price Statcade has observed in its daily updates since it started tracking the game; it is not Steam's full price history. Games discounted by 100% are free to keep and appear in Free games, not among the deals.
• PC requirements: the same Steam appdetails, pc_requirements field, downloaded by scripts/fetch_requirements.py and saved in data/requirements/. The “Can I run it?” tool compares component names against an approximate scale: it does not measure your computer.
• Copies sold: Wikipedia, “List of best-selling video games” (all platforms) and “List of best-selling PC games” (PC only, marked “PC”). If a game is not in these lists the figure is “n/a”: no number is estimated.
• News: Steam News (ISteamNews/GetNewsForApp) and public RSS feeds from the gaming press; every article names its source at the bottom.
• Speedruns: public speedrun.com leaderboards (API v1, no key), downloaded by scripts/fetch_speedruns.py into data/speedruns.json and updated on rotation (each game roughly every 3 days at least). For every game matched by name: world record and best times in the main categories, with the default subcategories; times are verified by speedrun.com moderators, not by Statcade. Data from speedrun.com are distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 licence (non-commercial use): Statcade selects and reformats them, and does not include them in its public API. Full list in Speedruns.
• Steam reviews (“Aged well or badly” page): public summary of Steam user reviews (store.steampowered.com/appreviews, all languages), downloaded by scripts/fetch_aging.py into data/aging/. We use only aggregate counts (positive and total reviews), never the texts. First month: from release day to the following 30 days; if the game was already on Steam before the Store date (early access) we start from its Steam debut, except for appids reused from an earlier game (debut more than 6 years earlier, e.g. Counter-Strike 2 replacing CS:GO), where the current game's date applies. First-month numbers are recorded only once and then stay fixed; the last 30 days (whole days, UTC) are updated every day. Only games with at least 50 reviews in both windows are ranked.
• Italian sentiment: public summary of Steam user reviews (appreviews endpoint, all purchase types, totals only, no text), downloaded by scripts/fetch_umore.py into data/umore.json, at most once a day per game and on rotation. For every game we compare the share of positive reviews written in Italian with the share across all languages (Italian included). What counts is the language of the review, not the reviewer's country. The “Italians like it more/less” badge requires at least 30 reviews in Italian and a difference of at least 10 percentage points; below 30 reviews the Italian percentage is not shown. Rankings in Italian sentiment.
• Companies page: official investor documents, cited on every company card. Conversions to euros use the European Central Bank reference rates shown on the page.
• Companies and developers: overview, studios and publishers, calendar and press page. The overview and calendar numbers are calculated from data/games.json e data/uscite.json; the list of studios and publishers from the credits in data/games.json; the article count on the press page from data/articles.json. It is the site's catalog, not an estimate of the global market: players are a Steam snapshot and copies sold are not added up.
• Esports: tournaments, matches and results from Liquipedia (MediaWiki API, content licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 US, adapted under the same licence), with scripts/esports.py: at most one check a day per game even if the site updates several times, and a 24-hour pause if Liquipedia rate-limits requests. For Dota 2, only when Liquipedia provides no recent results, results from OpenDota. Viewer numbers are not shown because no free, keyless source provides them. Details on the Esports page.

Articles are written in Italian by Statcade from the facts reported in the sources: title and date of the original announcement, Steam data and public sales estimates. We do not invent numbers or statements: when a figure is not available we mark it “n/a”. Original titles in other languages are quoted in quotation marks. The English pages are translations of the Italian ones.

Data are updated automatically every day.