How imho.run ranks Steam games
The exact criteria imho.run uses to rank Steam games: review threshold, audience size, refresh cadence, what's excluded, and how the recommendation engine combines collaborative filtering, content similarity, and review-mined gameplay vibes.
How games are ranked
Every game on every list is ordered by two signals — Steam's own review score first, total review volume second. The review score is the percentage of player reviews that are positive on Steam, computed from the same review pool the storefront shows. Total review volume is the number of player reviews the game has accumulated. Games with a higher score sort above games with a lower score; within the same score band, the game with the larger audience wins the tie. imho.run does not add weight for sponsorship, retail revenue, or new-release recency — none of those move a game up the list.
Review threshold for inclusion
To enter a ranked list a game must clear two floors: at least 100 player reviews on Steam, and a review score that puts it in "Mostly Positive" territory or better. The 100-review minimum is the lowest count at which the percentage stabilises — below it the score is too noisy to trust either way. The Mostly Positive cut-off rules out games whose own player base says don't bother. Hidden-gems lists use a stricter score floor (80% positive or higher) but a lower volume ceiling (under 5,000 reviews) so under-the-radar quality surfaces.
How often lists are refreshed
imho.run's catalogue is rebuilt once per day by a scraper that reads the public Steam Web and Store APIs. New releases enter the candidate pool the day after they cross the review threshold; games whose score drops below the threshold fall off the same way; sale prices, Steam Deck compatibility ratings, and review counts update on the same cadence. Game-specific landing pages (the "Games like X" surfaces) revalidate roughly every day, so the ranking visible to one user matches what the scraper produced overnight.
What's excluded
A central catalogue filter — applied at every read path that touches recommendations — strips out DLC, demos, advertising apps, soundtracks, software, and mods. Delisted titles are also excluded; once Valve removes a SKU from the store, it stops appearing in imho.run's rankings the next time the scraper sweeps. The seed game itself is excluded from its own "games like X" list — a Portal page never returns Portal.
How the recommendation engine picks similar games
The recommender combines three complementary signals into a single score per candidate. Collaborative filtering looks at which Steam players own and play games with libraries similar to the seed's audience — if you and many other players love game A and they also love game B, B becomes a stronger candidate. Content similarity looks at shared genres, Steam-storefront categories, Steam-storefront tags, developer, and publisher between the seed and every other game. Review-mined gameplay vibes use 768-dimension embeddings trained on actual player review text, so two games that reviewers describe in similar terms cluster together even when their Steam genre tags don't overlap. Each signal is min-max normalised across the candidate set and then combined; the final ranking is sorted by the blended score. Each pick on the page also carries a short rationale explaining which of the three signals contributed most.
What each filter means
Free means the title is marked free-to-play on Steam — no trial windows, no paid demos. Co-op means the game lists at least one Steam co-op category (online co-op, LAN co-op, or shared/split-screen co-op). Split-screen narrows that to games that explicitly support shared- or split-screen play on a single device. Single-player filters to titles whose Steam categories include single-player. Steam Deck Verified means Valve has certified the game runs on Steam Deck out of the box; Steam Deck Playable means it runs with some manual setup. Niche means the catalogue has more than a handful of similar games — used to weed out genre-of-one outliers from broad recommendation queries. No indie suppresses Steam-tagged Indie titles when a user wants AAA-only picks. OS-only matches the operating system the user is signed in from, so a Linux user without Proton stays on Linux-native games. Hardware-compatible uses the user's reported CPU/GPU/RAM (when shared) to skip games above their system's published minimum requirements.
What this site is not
imho.run is not a Steam wrapper, a price tracker, a wishlist manager, or an affiliate storefront. There are no sponsored placements on any ranked list. There are no "trending now" or "new release spotlight" slots that bypass the review threshold. There is no paid promotion path. The lists are built mechanically from public Steam data; no game can pay to move up.
Where the data comes from
All catalogue data — game names, genres, Steam-storefront tags, categories, Steam Deck compatibility status, prices, release dates, review counts, developer and publisher names — is read from the official Steam Web API and Steam Store API. Review-text features and review embeddings are computed from public Steam player reviews. imho.run does not scrape, store, or republish private user data beyond the public profile fields a player explicitly chooses to make visible on their Steam profile. Player libraries are only read after the player opts in via Steam OpenID sign-in or pastes their own SteamID.
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