GROGPOD Hidden Gems Methodology - ScottBurger/going_rogue_podcast GitHub Wiki

To me, a "hidden gem" of a game is something you think deserves highlighting. Something you liked more than others did or is overlooked. For the GROGPOD Roguelike Podcast, we do this by looking at how popular a game is relative to its peers and compare that to our own overall rankings of the game.

So for example, Path of Achra has some number of reviews that puts it at about the 385th most popular roguelike game on steam. That translates to the 75th most popular roguelike game that we've covered on the podcast so far. From our podcast aggregate rankings, it lands at 28th overall. So we just take the difference between the popularity rank (75) and the podcast overall rank (28) and it gets 47 "gem score" points as a result.

This allows us to sort the games we've played by that gem score to see what the top ones overall are, relative to their current popularity. It allows us to shine a light on games that we as a podcast liked more than their popularity would suggest. We're basically looking at the question of "well if a game is popular, it must be good, right?"

The overall hidden gem scores can be found here.