- APPENDIX -

HOW IT WORKS

PHASE 1 — LIBRARY SCAN

We read your Steam library through the Steam Web API. Every game you own is classified as either played (any playtime at all) or unplayed (zero hours).

PLAYED

Your top 12 most-played become "anchor" games that define your taste profile.

UNPLAYED

Up to 250 unplayed games become candidates for recommendation. DLC and tools are filtered out.

PHASE 2 — TASTE PROFILE

For each anchor game, we pull metadata from the Steam Store—genres, categories, developers, and publishers. These become feature vectors, weighted by square-root of playtime so that no single game dominates.

FEATURES: genre, categories (single-player, co-op, etc.), developer, publisher
WEIGHT: √(playtime) — dampens outliers, keeps signal from medium-playtime games

PHASE 3 — SCORING

Every unplayed candidate is scored against your taste profile using cosine similarity, combined with a quality signal from Metacritic scores and Steam recommendation counts.

Taste similarity60%

Quality score35%

Bonuses & penalties5%

Single-player games get a small boost. Early Access games get a penalty.

PHASE 4 — THE QUEST LOG

Results are split into three recommendation lists:

SIMILAR TO FAVORITES

Ranked by pure taste similarity — games whose features most closely match your anchor profile.

LIKELY TO GET PLAYED

The combined score (similarity + quality + bonuses). Balances your taste with community acclaim.

DAILY WILDCARD

Games you’ve barely touched (≤0.2% of your total playtime). Shuffled daily with a seeded RNG so picks change each day.

SPECIAL — FOCUS CHAIN

Click any anchor game to trigger a "If you liked X..." search. This uses Jaccard similarity on genres (78%), categories (17%), and developer (5%), then re-ranks using Steam user-defined tags when available (72% weight).

SPECIAL — LEVEL SYSTEM

Your Backlog Hunter level is based on the percentage of your library you've played.

PLAYED0% of libraryLV. 1PLAYED25% of libraryLV. 24PLAYED50% of libraryLV. 49PLAYED75% of libraryLV. 74PLAYED100% of libraryLV. 99

The HP bar shows your played percentage. The MP bar shows your unplayed percentage. Play more of your backlog to level up.

NOTE — PRIVACY

Your Steam profile's "Game details" must be set to Public for us to read your library. We don't store your data—everything is computed on the fly and cached briefly for performance.

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