The Elixir Index

Reception. We take Steam’s positive and negative review counts and compute the lower bound of a 95% confidence interval on the positive rate, rather than the raw percentage. A raw percentage lets 97% of 300 reviews outrank 94% of 400,000, which is an artefact of sample size and not a fact about the games. The lower bound asks the more useful question: what is the worst true rating consistent with this evidence? Confidence has to be earned with volume.

Support. A bounded adjustment for whether the developers are still shipping. Four substantial updates in six months, with a post inside the last 45 days, earns the full tier; less activity earns less. The reward closes at most 70% of the remaining distance to 100 instead of adding flat points, so a game already near the ceiling cannot be inflated past better-received ones, and 100 is unreachable in practice.

Silence is only a penalty where support was the promise. Early Access titles, live-service games, and anything released in the past two years lose up to six points for going quiet. A finished single-player game loses nothing — it ships no updates because it is complete, not because it was abandoned, and a ranking that punished Stardew Valley for being done would be describing its own bug.

What is excluded. Games with fewer than 50 reviews are unrated — below that the interval is so wide the number would be noise dressed as precision. This index further requires 500. Unreleased titles, Steam’s software categories, and adult titles carrying Steam’s Adult Only or Frequent Sexual Content descriptors are all left out. Descriptors for milder content are deliberately not filtered, since most mature role-playing games carry them.

The weights above are ours, and they are the only judgement in the system. We publish them so the argument can be about the method. Review counts come from Steam and refresh daily; developer activity is measured from announcements the developers themselves posted, with press coverage excluded. SteamElixir is not affiliated with Valve.