About Niklas Notes
Welcome! I'm Niklas Borglund, a professional game developer, and Niklas Notes is my passion-driven hobby project. Born out of curiosity, a love for games, and a fascination with data-driven insights, this site dives deep into analyzing games using cutting-edge AI technologies and publicly available data.
My mission is to help gamers, developers, and enthusiasts understand games better by revealing hidden gems and industry trends through comprehensive analytics. I want you to be able to make more informed choices when it comes to games.
My first real task is the one I've begun here: exploring the simple yet powerful question —"What are people actually saying about this game?"
Not critics, not professionals, not marketers — real people.
There's only so much a score can tell you about a game. With powerful AI tools at our fingertips, we now have the ability to uncover deeper, more insightful perspectives.
If you find value in this project, please consider supporting me by buying a coffee, sharing the site, or following me on social media.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Niklas Notes is my passion project offering unique, AI-powered analyses of games. It combines authentic player feedback and data analytics to provide real insights for gamers and developers alike.
I leverage publicly available data via the Steam Web API, combined with both aggregated analysis and AI-powered summarizations to deliver comprehensive insights.
I’ve refined the process with hundreds of prompt variations and thorough manual checks. While it isn't perfect, the summaries are a reliable indicator of overall sentiment. For the most detailed insights, please refer directly to the reviews.
Not entirely. For performance reasons, especially with popular games, I cap the dataset to a couple hundred reviews—mixing the most upvoted ones with a random selection to ensure diverse perspectives.
The impact score is a custom metric to help sort and filter games. For every 1,000 positive reviews, a game earns an additional 0.3 points, while penalties are applied for games with under 10,000 reviews.
This allows games with a slow start to climb the ranks over time by accumulating positive feedback while ensuring popular titles are accurately reflected.
Absolutely! You can support the project by buying me a coffee, sharing the site with friends, or simply by engaging with the content. Every bit of support makes a difference.
It is calculated by looking at how long players have actually played the game based on their Steam reviews. I only include reviews where players logged a significant amount of time (over 60 minutes) and gave a positive review. Then, to avoid skewing the results with outliers — like extremely short or long play sessions — I remove the very lowest and highest playtimes. Finally, I take the median of this “cleaned” data, which gives us a robust estimate of how long most players typically take to play through the game.
I’m excited to expand the project with additional data sources beyond Steam, introduce advanced search tools, offer personalized recommendations, and deliver even deeper data-driven analytics. Stay tuned for more updates!
There's a background service continuously checking games for updates, and it selects only games with a certain amount of reviews before automatic selection.
However, if you as a user enter a game's page - the system will get a notification that someone wants that analysis and will queue it for analysis. However, the game will need at least 60 reviews to be considered at all.
If a game is not available in search, you can try searching for the steam id for the game with this search: "platform:steam_id". Where you replace steam_id with the id for the game.