the-overdriven
commented
2 years ago For you sales date is more important, for me release date. Depending on what one is searching for we should have both.
Either way, as much as I hate to say, it's ultimately something that Steam has to fix, the messed up data is on their side. Any attempts to fix it on steamdb.info side wouldn't be better than ducktaping. Since Steam dates are unreliable I would rather pull this piece of information from other sources, but it would be difficult to automate connections.
Luckz
Feature Description
I love https://github.com/SteamDatabase/steamdb.info-issues/issues/367 because it lets me more easily find games that aren't going to get cheaper any time soon, or notice the five years old title that did just get cheaper. At least for the Sales page, I'm basically diametrically opposed in evaluation to #748, who claimed:
Store release dates are full of nonsense. Developers put the weirdest things there. Lately I've seen a whole bunch of random solo developer games that released in 2022 but claimed to be from 2019/2020.
To give you a practical example, right now, if I sort for oldest games, I do indeed find https://store.steampowered.com/app/318300/Phineas_and_Ferb_New_Inventions/ - discounted for the first time in around five years. Great! But there's also as "Feb 1991" https://steamdb.info/app/1260920/ with 7 Feb 2022 as the actual release date, and thus a very low 35% discount (and 2020 depots). Or "Jan 1997" https://steamdb.info/app/1257950/ which launched on Steam in August 2020. Or how about https://steamdb.info/app/1519140/ , a "2004" Early Access game. How even? For the purpose of looking at sales, these are newer releases. They shouldn't be at the very top of the oldest Steam releases on sale.
It's commendable that, right now, for "Release Date", SteamDB shows when they actually released on Steam. As a side note I feel the "Store Release Date" should also be on the overview table and not hidden in the Information tab, as it seems like something that'd help more users than for example the not very actionable Last Change Number. But on the page you sort by release date to buy things, it lists the nonsense date instead.
(For Early Access titles, it's also more useful to have the first-buyable date than the 1.0-release date, since the latter is very often rather arbitrary in nature. SteamDB's Release Date is unfortunately the 1.0 date, like for https://steamdb.info/app/644930/info/ .)
P.S.: I believe for a short while in the last year or two, the sales page actually showed Steam availability dates rather than fake store dates? Or maybe I was hallucinating.