# Surviving review arrivals over game lifetimes

New bounded study authorized by the owner when requesting the remaining research
avenues. The earlier language study's stopped collector remains stopped. This
study has a separate frozen sample and policy; the root bulk catalog policy is
unchanged and remains paused.

## Frame and sample

65,839 currently paid games outside explicit descriptors 3/4, with recorded
release dates in 2016–2024 and fewer than 10,000 snapshot filtered reviews.
The 964 games at or above 10,000 reviews are explicitly outside this frame;
the study does not estimate the trajectory distribution of Steam's biggest
games. This frame covers 98.6% of the otherwise eligible app identities, not
98.6% of reviews or purchases.

Five games were randomly selected per period x current-review band: periods
2016–2018, 2019–2021, 2022–2024; bands 0–49, 50–199, 200–999, 1,000–9,999. Sixty
games total, with fixed seeds and no name/tag/trajectory selection. Current
review bands define the sampling design, not launch-time success categories.
Collection order interleaves strata in complete twelve-game rounds. Sample
probabilities and original source counts remain saved.

## Collection and history meaning

All-language Steam-purchase reviews with off-topic filtering, ordered by creation
time using filter=recent, paginated to an empty response. Only review IDs,
creation/update timestamps, purchase flag and Early Access flag are retained.
No text, account/profile identifiers, playtime or recommendation sentiment is
collected. Sanitized response pages preserve cursors, summaries and timestamps.

These are creation dates of currently returned reviews. Deleted, hidden or
filtered reviews can be absent. Summary counts can differ slightly from the
paginated rows. Gaps and late arrivals describe surviving reviews, not the
original complete transaction or review record. Nothing identifies new versus
returning players, purchases, revenue, marketing effort or update effects.

Caps: 800 requests and 65,000 retained reviews, 2 MB per response, at least two
seconds between request starts, no retries, stop on errors. The policy is closed
in a finally block. A STOP file prevents another request. Original snapshot
responses and prior studies are not modified.

## Time definitions

- Review counts by 7/30/90/365/730 actual days from the recorded earliest Steam
  date, not the first nonempty month. Horizons ending after September 1, 2026
  remain missing. Very small pre-date offsets up to seven days enter the early
  window; a review more than seven days before the date flags the release clock
  and removes that game from release-anchored comparisons.
- A separate first-surviving-review clock is retained for sensitivity. It is
  neither proof of first public availability nor a replacement release date.
- Full calendar-month series include zero months. Recent activity means the
  twelve full months September 2025 through August 2026. One active month can
  contain just one review; counts and months with at least five reviews are also
  retained so isolated reviews are not called a large audience.
- Late-burst screen: a three-month block starting after year one, with at least
  twenty reviews and at least four times the monthly rate in the preceding six
  months (a one-review expected-block floor prevents division by zero).
  Overlapping starts within six months are grouped. Alternative screens use
  15/3x and 50/6x. This is an exploratory temporal shape, not proof of a revival,
  statistical significance, or a particular cause.
- Ever-burst rates have unequal observation lengths. A separate first-two-year
  indicator requires a fully mature two-year window. Do not interpret raw
  cross-era ever-burst differences as a temporal trend.

Weighted proportions and quantiles use frame/sample weights. Approximate 95%
intervals use stratified linearized ratio variance with finite population
correction, and reflect only sampling variation. Boundary samples without
variation receive no interval. Small samples within each cell mean estimates
are approximate; precise genre rankings are not supported. Counts by current
review band are descriptive and cannot be read as forecasts for new releases.

Headline distributions separate games with at least fifty current reviews from
the quietest group. First-year fractions and growth ratios exclude zero
denominators; an additional first-year >=10-review sensitivity is retained.
Current lifetime fractions remain age-dependent even when their first-year
numerators use exact days. Equal-age first-year and second-year measures are
therefore reported separately.

## Reproduction

Use `../.venv/bin/python`: `prepare.py` freezes the sample; `collect.py` is the
scoped network step and requires an active policy; `analyze.py`, `followups.py`,
`charts.py`, and `validate.py` are offline. Reproducing saved results does not
require restarting collection. Source documentation:
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/getreviews .