Yesterday Valve removed most of the Game Hubs we started processing to see if we could find anything interesting (we did).
This means we have removed them as well. A list of all Game Hubs we found is still available here.
However, this is was only one of many ways to discover "hidden" apps. Here's one more.
Blotter
A while back Valve introduced Blotter (part of the new Steam Community). You can open up Blotter by clicking on the Community tab in your Steam Client. See that "TAG WITH GAME" option? That auto-complete list contains apps of which Game Hubs were removed earlier today (minus Halo 3, which they seem to have removed all references of except for the Official Group page).
The autocomplete list is easily parsable, given a keyword.
Official Game Groups (OGG's in the Steam Database) are another way of finding things that shouldn't be public but are.
Apps such as the Angry Birds series (pictured above) are still available here, even though the Game Hubs for the exact same apps were deleted earlier. This bug was reported to Valve a few months ago and has been public knowledge for longer than that but has gone unfixed since. There's probably more that we don't know of.
Dyad
Between yesterday's rubbish was a true gem though; the amazing Dyad!
The Game Hub being public (and us indexing it) forced its developer to announce it early.
We're so sorry for that and meant no harm from doing so, yet we applaud the developer for bringing the game to Steam on PC, Mac and Linux (something which developers should do more often (especially Linux!)).
We'll be buying it for sure, and so should you!
Changelog for February 4, 2013
- CSS changes to the header/alpha warning.
- Added DISQUS comments to the blog.
- Added an RSS feed to the blog.
That's all for today.