Hey friends!

First of all, thank you for visiting my little website. I’m truly honored to have you here among the very first users. You’re helping shape the future of this project, and I’m really thankful for it.

I’ve decided it’s time to start sharing, in more detail, how the project is developing and what new features I’m shipping. In this very first post, I’ll highlight everything we shipped during March and the beginning of April. I plan to publish these updates monthly. Let’s go!

This is kind of meta, since you’re reading it right now, but I just wanted to highlight that I’ve added a blog where I’ll post dev updates like this, and maybe some gaming-related articles (like game collections on specific themes).

If you have any ideas for the blog, just let me know by email. And yes, I’ll occasionally send out newsletter issues to users who signed up. I promise not to spam!

This is one of my favorite changes from last month. In the soft launch, filters were pretty basic, and it was time to level them up.

First, I added multi-select filters, which makes finding games way more efficient.

In addition, a few more new options were added: 

Sorting was also improved, and a new Upcoming filter shows games that haven’t been released yet.

Since this platform has a social aspect at its core, I want it to feel like a place where people can follow friends, see what they’re playing, and share thoughts about games. That’s one of the biggest focuses for me.

So first small step: you can now follow and unfollow members of the community. Also, on any user’s profile, the Network tab (or clicking the follower/following counters) will show you their followers and people they follow.

Of course, if you followed someone, you might want to see what those people are up to, so an Activity feed was added. At least for now, I don’t want to make doomscrolling the main aspect of this platform, so the feed is not the main focal point of the website, but rather one of the aspects of it. I like the Letterboxd approach in that sense.

On the Activity feed, you can also view a Recent feed of activity across the whole site. For now, it’s manageable, as the platform is still in the very early stage, but as the site grows, I might limit it to the past month or something.

I always like some friendly competition and leaderboards (in the opposite to algorithmic social media approach), so I’ve created Top 100 members leaderboards by various aspects: most followers gained, most games added, most reviews written, and most lists created.

Hopefully, it will add some fun into growing your profile and climbing this leaderboard. Maybe some special badges will be added later to highlight your achievements ;)

Up to no, there was no profile customization, but I want Search to Play users to have unique and personalized profiles to share with friends and on social media.

So now you can:

More customization options are coming!

In addition, the entire profile page has been revamped and improved. Instead of navigating through various sections, all user information is now visible on the profile page, and you can simply click on tabs to switch views to display:

I believe user profiles will continue to evolve over time, but I'm quite pleased with their current state and can’t wait to see more users grow and personalize their profiles.

One of the key ideas behind this project is data-driven discovery. I often use data to make both small and big life decisions, including choosing games. From the start, I integrated my favorite services: Opencritic and How Long to Beat (HLTB).

HLTB focuses on collecting data about how long players spend on games in various modes. However, the HLTB integration was very quickly implemented and frequently buggy, so it was time for an overhaul.

After the update, the integration works like a clock. For (Ruby) developers out there, I even created a gem for easier maintenance and maybe to help some other developers with integration.

Additionally, I added new parameters to display on game pages based on the game’s modes. For single-player games, it now shows Main, Main + Extras, Complete, and All styles (combination of all types of playthroughs).

For multiplayer games, two new sections were also added: Multiplayer and Co-op, showing how much people on average spend in each mode.

Overall, this integration is now much more stable, and it has reduced the number of requests made to HLTB servers, improving the overall performance of searchtoplay.com. Some games may still contain outdated data, but the platform is gradually updating all games’ database to ensure accuracy.

Each game page now includes links to various stores. I’ve added links to the PlayStation Store, Microsoft/Xbox Store, Steam, Epic Store, and Amazon (our first experiment with affiliations).

Unfortunately, this data isn't as comprehensive on the IGDB side, so if you notice any missing links, feel free to email me, and I’ll add them manually. In the future, I plan to either automate this process or allow users to add game store links themselves. This way, we can build our own crowdsourced collection without relying on external APIs.

A few smaller improvements have also been made.

I’ve improved the landing page and dashboard. Both are accessible via the root URL at searchtoplay.com, but what you see will depend on whether you're logged in or not. I’ve added dynamic user-generated content to both, such as recent reviews, created lists, and friends' activity on the dashboard. I'm still experimenting with these features and would love your feedback on what you'd like to see on the dashboard. Feel free to hit me up with any ideas.

User profiles are now accessible directly via searchtoplay.com/<username> instead of searchtoplay.com/users/<username> as before. The old links still work and redirect to the new, more streamlined URLs.

We've transitioned from the old game slug system to using IGDB’s. Since we rely on the IGDB API as our primary source for games, it made sense to adopt their slug system. Now, if you can find a game at searchtoplay.com/games/grand-theft-auto-v, it will also be accessible on IGDB at igdb.com/games/grand-theft-auto-v. This change also simplifies debugging of missing games.

More consoles have been added to filters and game pages, primarily retro consoles, such as old Nintendo and Sega models. The newly announced Nintendo Switch 2 is of course also included.

I've set up a newsletter pool of users in my email service provider. Any signed-up user will be automatically added to this pool, allowing me to send out newsletters (you've probably already received one). This setup also ensures users can unsubscribe from these emails while still receiving transactional emails from the platform.

A sitemap has been generated for Google and other search engines. This project is likely to host the most pages I've ever managed on a website, with hundreds of thousands of filter and game variations. Google and other search engines don’t like this. So I’ve created a sitemap highlighting our most important content to guide search engines in identifying the key pages for indexing and ranking. Currently, it includes 210,000 pages.

I'm quite happy with the project's progress, but like any social-based platform, I need to attract more users and feedback to guide improvements. If you'd like to support future development, please share the platform with friends or provide any feedback at https://searchtoplay.featurebase.app or via email.

Here's my current roadmap of features I'm planning. You can vote for the ones you find most valuable. My current top priority is importing games from other platforms, especially integration with PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam, allowing you to sync your games instantly without manual one by one entry.

I am also trying to be slightly more active on social media, mainly on BlueSky, X, and Threads. Feel free to follow! You can also join our Discord server or Subreddit for any questions/feedback.

Thank you for reading this, and I have a great and sunny spring! Keep playing, take care, and I’ll see you soon.