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what each tool answers and how to use it

PlayRecon is market intelligence for people shipping games on Steam. Every tool works on the same dataset — release dates, wishlists, chart positions, followers and reviews for 300k+ store pages, refreshed hourly. The date in the sidebar footer shows the current data snapshot.

Calendar

Answers one question: who else ships in your window. Pick any week, month, quarter or year — past or future — and see every release in it, sized by demand.

Pick a period. Switch Weeks / Months / Quarters / Years at the top; arrows step to the previous or next period, Now returns to today. History goes back to 1997. TBA collects announced games without a date.
Choose what tile area means. Score (default) blends followers with staying power on the Popular Upcoming chart; PU and WL size tiles purely by chart rank; Followers by community size.
Switch to List for a flat feed of the same games — 100 per page with peak PU rank, wishlist rank, followers, reviews and demo CCU on each card. Sort by demand, date, followers or reviews.
Filter by tag to narrow the whole page to your genre — the filter carries across periods while you navigate.

how the mosaic sizes tiles

Tiles are laid out in justified rows: every row spans the full width, all tiles in one row share the same size, and row heights step down as demand falls. Every capsule keeps Steam's exact 231:87 proportions, so nothing is cropped — a game's area stays proportional to its demand weight, quantized to its row. The weight depends on the selected tile-area metric:

Score	(followers + 15)^0.7 × (1 + 0.3 × occupancy)	followers on a power law with a staying-power boost; games released before rank tracking substitute reviews × 3 for followers
PU / WL	1 / rank^0.6	peak chart position; PU is additionally multiplied by (1 + 0.66 × occupancy)
Followers	√followers + 0.35	community size alone

occupancy — the share of a game's runway (first Popular Upcoming appearance → release) it actually held a chart spot. It rewards staying power without punishing games that announce a precise date late.

Calendar controls — Period views, Mosaic/List switch, tile-area metric and the metrics legend.

Calendar list view — List view: one row per release with the full metric set.

Period header — The period header shows the release count and a mini histogram of how they spread inside the period.

Heatmap

Shows how crowded every shipping window has been — and which announced weeks are already filling up. Use it to find quiet windows before committing to a date.

Days or Weeks — daily cells cover the recent two years; weekly cells go back to 1997.
Count or Calibre — Count colors cells by how many games shipped; Calibre weighs them by traction (reviews for the past, followers for announced games), so one heavyweight lights a cell up.
Hover a cell to see the period's top-20 in the side panel; click to pin it. Each entry links to the game.
Mind the hatched area. Far-future cells only contain chart-toppers — emptiness there does not mean the window will stay free.

Seasonality

Shows when each genre actually ships and how those months perform, so you can tell a genuinely quiet month from one that is quiet for a reason.

Trends

The macro view: how fast the market grows, what a release gets on average, how many Steam users there are per release, and which tags rise or fade.

Tag eras chart — Tag eras: every tag with 100+ games as one line — share of the year's releases carrying it. Hover to trace a line, click or search to pin up to six.

Growth — releases per year with yearly change, plus weekday and month patterns. Filter by genre to see your market, not the whole store.
Steam users per release — yearly peak online users divided by dated releases: one line that shows how competition tightened.
Tag eras — use the log scale to compare small tags; labels sit at each tag's peak year.

Studios

What happens to the people who ship: how many studios ever release a second game, whether experience pays, and what a publisher changes.

Window Finder

Recommends release windows for your game: give it your genre and constraints, and it scores every candidate window by crowding and collisions with heavyweight releases.

Pick your genre tags (up to ten) — crowding is computed against games that share them, not the whole store.
Constrain the range if your dates are already boxed in — a quarter, a month, anything.
Set the heavyweight threshold — the follower count above which a neighbouring release counts as a collision to avoid.
Attach your game via search to keep the context while you compare windows.

Metrics

The same few metrics appear across every tool. All of them come straight from Steam surfaces — nothing is modelled unless labelled as an estimate.

PU #	Position in Steam’s Popular Upcoming chart. Ranks are dynamic, so for released games it is the peak position reached; the ·Nd suffix is how many days the game held a chart spot. Steam keeps no archive of the chart, so we have a rank only for games whose run overlaps our recording — releases from before it have none, and their period pages omit the row instead of showing a zero.
WL #	Global wishlist rank on Steam. For released games it is the best position reached before release. Recorded live for the same reason as the Popular Upcoming rank: Steam publishes the standing, not its history.
Followers	Followers of the game’s Steam community hub — the broadest publicly visible demand signal, and the only one Steam shows for every page.
Score	A composite used for mosaic tile area, not a Steam metric: followers on a power-law scale with a boost for days spent in the Popular Upcoming chart. Games released before rank tracking began use reviews as a proxy for followers.
Reviews	Total review count on the store page. The standard scale proxy for released games: Steam does not publish sales, and reviews track them at a roughly stable ratio within a niche.
Demo	The game has a demo on Steam; the number beside the icon is the demo’s peak concurrent players.
Dud	A released game whose lifetime review count stayed under 10. Used as the failure share of a niche: it counts the releases that got no visible traction at all, and it is included in every distribution on purpose — a niche looks better than it is if failures are dropped.
Unseen	A release with no followers, no wishlist rank and no time on the Popular Upcoming chart. Not the same as a failure: it means Steam’s public surfaces never showed the game, so nothing can be said about its demand either way.
Data as of	The date of the data snapshot every number on the page is built from. Store pages are re-read hourly; the date shows when the visible aggregate was last rebuilt.

Full definitions, including which numbers are Steam’s and which are ours, are on Metrics and definitions.

Data

Coverage and freshness — what the numbers are built on and where the edges are.

Release dates, tags, prices, reviews and followers come from Steam store pages — all 300k+ of them. Data refreshes hourly; the sidebar footer shows the snapshot date.
Popular Upcoming and wishlist ranks have been tracked continuously since July 2026. Games released earlier have no rank history, so demand for them falls back to reviews.
Calendar history reaches back to 1997 — as far as Steam store pages carry dated releases. Far-future coverage is limited to chart-toppers: precise dates usually appear two to four weeks before release.
Questions or something looks off? Write to [email protected].