Monthly updates recap

Serge Ulankin
RAWG
Published in
3 min readMar 6, 2018

When feedback rains, RAWG pours updates

Early in Febraury we launched RAWG on Product Hunt and earned over 650 upvotes. Then GenBeta, a large Spanish outlet, made a review about us. Then GamesIndustry.biz published an in-depth interview with Dasha Lyalin, our COO. Then the feedback and new users poured in.

RAWG’s team overwhelmed by positive feedback

We personally replied to over 100 emails alone, leaving aside our Twitter and Discord where we got lots of positive feedback too. Newcomers suggested new features and solutions to problems — some were truly ingenious, and we even included them in our roadmap! They created tons of amazing content. They also noticed, and we are not embarassed by it, a few bugs. We worked all February to fix things, build things, and polish other things, and I’d like to recap what we rolled out last month.

Advanced search

This was one of the most popular requests made by rawgers. Originally, RAWG let you search only for games, but since there are collections, game creators, and friends you can follow, it is only natural people wanted to find them. Now you can find amazing people and content on RAWG, or connect with friends.

User profile bio

Giving rawgers more tools to personalize their libraries and content is essential to us. We started small: now there is a place for a short bio in profiles. You can add links to your social accounts or tell about your interests in 512 characters.

Game credits page

Highlighting game creators became our pride. We can’t be called ‘the IMDb of video games’ without giving proper respect to the people behind games. So we added a credits page to each game in the database, and now you can easily browse through all development team and find other projects of these people. Here is the credits page for GTA V.

Import page video instructions

One of the most crucial messages we received last month was that new users found it difficult to grasp how PS, Xbox, and Steam libraries import worked on RAWG. The APIs we use are different, so what seems to be a simple input form on RAWG is really lots of code and tools bound together. Lots of rawgers set their profiles private a long time ago, and they were confused that RAWG couldn’t import their games. Also, we couldn’t count the times when newcomers mixed up their IDs, profile names, nicknames, and whatnot, and as a result they got libraries full of somebody else’s games. Frustrating the import page was, and it was all our fault, so we came up with a new page. We also added few how-to videos, like the one below.

Better feedback form

The last thing worth mentioning is a revamped feedback page. Nothing too fancy here, it just works better, looks better, and feels better. So send better feedback! Just kidding, we are equally grateful for praise and criticism.

What’s next?

In few words: ‘Lots of amazing features’. We sorted out bugs and things that had needed to be done before. Now we have moved onto building new exciting features that we will launch really soon. Stay updated, stay rawged.

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