Method and data

Who it's for

Indie developers who send Steam keys through Curator Connect before a launch or a Next Fest. Most unsolicited key requests come from resellers posing as curators, and Steam's own list ranks them first because they buy followers. I built this to find the curators who cover games like mine and skip the ones that look fake.

Data sources

• Steam's curator directory (public): name, followers, the number of those followers Steam rates "high value", all-time review counts, the date of the last review. Read once a day for all 4,637 curators. Each read also stores that day's follower count, which builds the follower history.
• Each curator's recommendations (public): game, verdict and day, plus the game's first Steam tags. The latest 100 for every curator with 200 or more followers (1,179 today), refreshed about daily. Older posts stay in the database, so a curator's history grows past what Steam shows at once.
• Developers' key logs: which curator got a key for which game on which day. Anonymous; tied to a random browser id. 0 logged.
• Curator claims: genres, contact and availability, entered by curators who proved they run the page. 0 claimed.

A Cloudflare Worker does the reading, a few requests every five minutes, so Steam never sees a burst. When Steam limits requests it waits half an hour. Nothing is read from Steamworks, from anyone's account, or from pages that need a login. I'm not affiliated with Valve.

How the numbers are computed

Search ranking. Each of your games a curator covered adds up to 10 points: full value for a post in the last month, half for one six months older, a quarter a year older; informational posts count 70%. Activity adds a little (log of posts in 90 days), followers add a little on a log scale, each warning-sign point takes 6 away, a publisher's own page loses 6, and a verified curator who is taking games gains 3. A curator that posted about half or more of its logged keys gains 4. Curators with 3 or more sign points are hidden unless you ask.

Warning signs. 13 rules, each with a reason shown on the curator's page. They are on the warning signs page with their thresholds. One or two points rank a curator lower; three or more hide it.

Twins and rings. Two curators are twins when they recommended 8 or more of the same games on the same days. I skip this sign when more than half of a curator's followers are high value, because publisher families (THQ Nordic, Tripwire, Eidos) post each other's releases the same day and have real followers.

Logged keys. A key is decided when the curator posts about the game, or 30 days pass without a post. A curator's rate shows once 3 keys from at least 2 developers are decided.

Limits

• Steam shows the day of a post, not the time.
• A curator who covered your comparison game long ago and has posted a lot since won't show up, because I only see its latest 100 posts from before the crawl started.
• Curators with fewer than 200 followers aren't read daily, unless someone logs a key to them.
• "High value" is Steam's label. Steam doesn't say how it decides.
• Follower history starts on Oct 31, 2026. Follower jumps can only be seen from then on.

What runs behind it

One Cloudflare Worker and one D1 database. A cron every five minutes reads a page of the directory and up to 8 curators, inside Steam's rate limits and Cloudflare's free-plan budget of 50 requests per run. Same-day overlap between every pair of curators is computed in SQL as each one is read. Alerts go out from the same run that spots the post.

Questions about the method: contact. History of changes: changelog.