Changelog

Your stuff finally has three clear names. The games you own and track live in your Library, the consoles you own sit in your Inventory, and the lists you build are now Collections.

• Library is the home for the games you own and follow, on its own page at /library
• Inventory splits your consoles out to their own page at /inventory
• Collections is the new name for lists, the sets of games you curate, now at /collections
• Profiles show the three as separate stats, so anyone can jump straight to your Library, Inventory, or Collections
• Old links keep working: bookmarked /collection and /lists pages redirect to their new homes
• The mobile app speaks the same vocabulary, keeping one Library tab with Games, Inventory, and Wishlist inside

The arcade gets its second game. Guess the Year sits a game's box art and blurb in front of you and asks one thing: when did this come out?

• New game live at /fun/guess-the-year
• Slide to the release year over a ten-card round; closer guesses score more
• Every round spans decades, so you cannot guess the same year each time
• Blurbs have their years hidden, so the text never gives it away
• Share your score with an arcade card

VGDB learned to play. A new Fun and Games corner opens with its first title: Higher or Lower, a Metacritic guessing game with foil cards and a ten-second clock.

• New /fun arcade hub, built to grow as more games land
• Higher or Lower: guess if each game scored higher or lower than the last on Metacritic
• Three difficulty tiers, from household names to deep cuts
• Beat the clock: ten seconds a card, no time to look it up
• Share your streak with a generated score card

The mobile Search tab finishes its Letterboxd-style IA. Four new browse-by surfaces land alongside the platform / genre / year drill-downs already shipped: Most Popular, Highest Rated, Upcoming, and Featured Lists.

• Most Popular sorts the catalogue by view count, so the games people are actually looking at rise to the top.
• Highest Rated only lists games with at least five reviews, so a single 10/10 cannot crown the top.
• Upcoming is a forward look: confirmed releases only, nearest first.
• Featured Lists surfaces the newest public lists that have more than ten games in them.
• Backend now keeps live rating aggregates and list item counts on the games and game_lists tables, so these surfaces paginate cleanly even as the catalogue grows.

Every link shared from VGDB now renders a branded, data-rich preview card on Discord, Twitter, WhatsApp, and beyond. 24 dynamic OG images across the entire site, built on a shared utility library.

• Dynamic OG share cards for game pages with cover art, community rating, platform tags, and a View Game CTA
• Review and rating cards showing the reviewer's quote, score, and a Have Your Say CTA
• Profile cards with avatar, bio, and collection stats (games, consoles, reviews, completed)
• Branded cards for YouTubers, websites, articles, franchises, series, platforms, generations, and lists
• Static cards for news, changelog, timeline, about, and all listing pages
• Fixed double "| VGDB" suffix in browser tab titles across the entire site

The About page gets a visual upgrade and a new face. Custom pixel art avatars replace the old profile photos, and KaipoNat joins the team roster.

• Custom pixel art character avatars for every team member
• KaipoNat added to the Meet the Team section
• All team images converted to WebP for faster page loads

Signing in now takes you somewhere worth going. Logged-in players land on a personalised dashboard that shows the community in motion and puts your next action one tap away.

• Welcome hero with your avatar, a monthly activity summary (reviews, lists, screenshots, articles), and four quick-action CTAs
• Community tabs spanning the left two-thirds: flip between the latest Reviews, Lists, Screenshots, and Articles from across the site
• Live activity feed on the right third: a rich-linked stream of site-wide events covering reviews, lists, screenshots, articles, and new members joining
• Unauthenticated visitors continue to see the existing landing page - nothing changes for guests

A top-level /news page that pulls together headlines from across gaming media into one curated hub. No more hopping between a dozen bookmarks.

• Top Stories rail featuring the latest from editorially-highlighted sources, one headline per site
• Content-type sections for News, Deals, Esports, and Retro, each with article previews and source attribution
• Source directory sidebar grouping every RSS-enabled site by category, linking through to the full website profiles
• Powered entirely by the existing daily RSS refresh, zero editorial maintenance required
• News link added to the main nav bar, mobile drawer, and footer

A new daily discovery surface. Every day, the homepage and a dedicated page surface every game and platform that launched on today's date throughout gaming history.

• Homepage teaser section after High Scores showing six games released on this date, with the day's marquee game highlighted
• Dedicated /today page with Notable Anniversaries banner spotlighting milestone games (10, 15, 20, 25, 30+ year marks)
• Year-grouped cover grids showing every release on this date, newest first
• Platform anniversary banners when a console launched on today's date

The game details page got a full redesign. Three clear layers, cinematic hero up top, every action in one control row, and five tabs to surface everything we know about a game.

• Cinematic hero with box art, game info, and a score ring showing VGDB, Steam, and Metacritic ratings at a glance
• Persistent control row with collection, wishlist, D-pad actions menu, and best-deal pricing
• Five-tab layout: Overview, Media, Reviews, Details, and Community, with deep-link hashes
• Related games grid pulling series siblings, franchise siblings, and DLC into one toggled view
• Rating distribution chart showing the 1-10 breakdown of community scores
• Steam achievements gallery on the Community tab, pulled from stored JSONB data

Sign-up and sign-in came home to mobile. Sign in with Apple on iPhone, Sign in with Google on Android, the same VGDB account on every device. Google on iPhone follows in a point release.

• Sign in with Apple on iOS - the native sheet, no in-app browser
• Sign in with Google on Android - via Play Services, no in-app browser
• Same account everywhere: sign up on the web with Google, sign in on mobile with Apple, both come back to one VGDB profile
• Email-collision linking carries you through the rare case where two providers meet at the same address
• Built on the back of the web release that opened the same doors last week

The Fresh Drops row on the games landing page grew up. Pick a window, see the games, repeat. Last week, this week, next week, the next thirty days.

• New Game Releases section on /games: an 8 x 3 grid replacing the old horizontal scroll row
• Four windowed views: Last Week, This Week, Next Week, Next 30 Days, plus View All into the catalogue
• Tabs glide between views with a soft crossfade so the page never jolts
• Weeks follow the calendar (Monday to Sunday) and roll over automatically
• Faster to find what just shipped, and what is coming next, without scrolling sideways

Sign in with Google and Sign in with Apple land on the web. One click and you are in, with your existing email account auto-linked the first time.

• Continue with Google on the sign in and sign up pages
• Continue with Apple on the sign in and sign up pages
• Returning users skip the password step on devices they have used before
• Existing email accounts auto-link when the OAuth provider returns the same verified address

The Alpha sticker comes off. Catalogue, collections, lists, articles, reviews, the social loop, the mobile companion in TestFlight, and the freshly minted Resources index have all stood up well enough to retire the early-warning label. Plenty still to build, but the bones are sound.

• Site-wide Alpha badge swapped for Beta in the nav
• Terms updated to mark the Beta start date, with the original Alpha date preserved for context
• Privacy notice deadline language re-pointed at the next milestone
• No functional changes in this release, just a recalibration: things still move, but the breaking-change drumbeat slows from here

Websites joins YouTubers in the Resources index. A curated bookmark bar of gaming news, storefronts, deal trackers, forums, mods, esports references, and the smaller newsletters worth your inbox. News sites surface their latest headlines so the page is alive, not just a list of links.

• New /resources/websites browse with category, language, region, and free-vs-paywalled filters plus five sort orders
• Detail pages with site description, content-type tags, related-sites rail, and a live 'Latest headlines' rail for news sites that refreshes daily
• Like and save buttons match the YouTubers pattern; saves accumulate for the eventual My Resources tab on your profile
• 38 sites seeded across nine categories at launch: IGN, Eurogamer, Polygon, Humble Bundle, GOG, IsThereAnyDeal, Nexus Mods, Liquipedia, Hardcore Gaming 101 and more
• Auto link-rot detection: any site that stops responding for three days running quietly drops from the public grid (admin can still see and revive it)
• Admin paste-a-URL flow auto-discovers the site's OG image, description, and RSS feed candidates so adding a new site is usually under thirty seconds

Resources lands as a new top-level section of the site, with YouTubers as the first sub-section. A growing index of the channels, sites and feeds that make games more fun to follow, all curated and all linked back into the rest of the catalogue.

• New Resources tab in the main nav, with YouTubers live and Websites and Instagrams scaffolded as 'Coming soon' for the next rounds
• YouTubers browse with search, filters for content type / platform / language / family-safe, and five sort orders including most-liked and recently-active
• Detail pages with banner artwork, channel info, the latest uploads (click straight out to YouTube), and a related-channels rail
• Like and save buttons so you can flag favourites; saved channels will surface under a future My Resources tab on your profile
• Admin two-step add flow: paste a channel URL or @handle, we pull the snapshot from YouTube, you review and save

Every transactional email VGDB sends now wears the house colours. Sign-up confirmation, password reset, magic-link, email change, and the welcome-after-onboarding email all share the same on-brand templates and arrive from a verified vgdb.co sender.

• Branded confirm-signup, magic-link, reset-password, change-email, and reauthentication emails replacing the boilerplate defaults
• Welcome email fires the moment a new player finishes the onboarding wizard, with a one-tap link straight to their profile
• All transactional mail flows through a single verified vgdb.co sender with DKIM, SPF, and DMARC properly configured
• Template typography swapped from Playfair Display to Outfit so the wordmark and headings finally match the site's geometric sans look
• Dashboard-managed email templates retired: the templates now live in the repo and get reviewed in PRs like the rest of the codebase

Uploading and editing screenshots gets a calmer two-column layout, with the live preview pinned next to the form fields so what you're describing stays visible while you type.

• Screenshot upload form restructured: file picker, title, description, and game link on the left; live preview on the right
• Same two-column treatment on the edit form for consistency between submit and revise
• Tighter empty states across both forms when no file has been picked yet

Community screenshots step out of the per-game gallery and into their own room. A cinematic hero, a fresh-drops grid, and a spotlight on the players keeping the cameras rolling.

• New /media landing page with a cinematic Featured Shot hero, deterministically rotating through the most recent community uploads
• Fresh Drops grid showing the twelve latest community screenshots
• This Month's Top Uploaders strip celebrating the most prolific contributors and routing through to their personal galleries
• Games Getting Love Right Now grid pointing at the games drawing the most community uploads in the last thirty days
• Honest Coming Soon cards for Trailers and Artwork until those rails are ready
• Media link in the Games nav finally active. No more Coming Soon badge

Mobile players get a Preferences home that remembers your settings between sessions, a Help screen that actually answers VGDB questions, and a quieter rule for which lists show on visitor profile views.

• New Preferences section in mobile Settings: pick a theme (auto, light, or dark) and it sticks across app restarts
• Toggle for showing game titles on Library cover-card grids, so the gallery can read clean or hand-labelled
• Help & FAQs rewritten with VGDB-specific answers covering libraries, lists, reviews, and screenshots
• Lists with fewer than four games stay hidden on visitor profile views, so half-finished drafts do not surface until they have something to show

Lists become a thing you build on mobile, not just a thing you read. A dedicated editor, batch picker, and a reusable SaveToListSheet land games on the right list in two taps.

• Dedicated mobile editor for list metadata: name, description, public or private, ranked toggle
• Drag-to-reorder on ranked lists with optimistic UI and server-canonical reconciliation
• Batch-add games from a search-driven picker grid, multi-select before confirming
• Per-item notes via a bottom sheet, with the italic preview surfacing on each row
• SaveToListSheet reachable from the game-detail action bar, the profile lists page, and a long-press menu on Library Games tiles
• Inline create-new-list flow from any save action with the current game pre-seeded as the first item

Settings grew up. About, Changelog, and Roadmap now live one tap away on mobile, and Help got the FAQ label it deserved.

• New About screen with version, build, and the three legal links
• Changelog reachable from inside the app, sharing the same source as the web release notes
• A mobile-only Roadmap with its own arc (Apple Sign-In, search drill-downs, personalised Discover), in the same medium-gaming voice as the web roadmap
• Settings reorganised into Account and VGDB groups for easier scanning

Mobile profiles became social. Tap a reviewer, follow them, or browse who follows whom. The four-tab IA is now complete enough for a TestFlight cut.

• Public user pages on mobile, reachable from any review-card author tap on a game detail screen.
• Follow and Unfollow with a single tap, optimistic flip, rollback on failure.
• Tappable Followers and Following counts open paginated lists with a Follow button on every row.
• Private profiles and blocked viewers each get their own honest empty state, no broken affordances.
• Profile tab Reviews, Lists, and rating histogram (shipped in P3a) now match the public surface.

Reviews get a real address. Every user review now lives at its own URL with a hero, a rich body that breathes, and a stat panel that places the score in the room.

• Dedicated SEO-friendly URLs at /games/[slug]/reviews/[username] for every review
• Rich-text rendering on the body — headings, lists, inline images — via the new ReviewBodyRenderer (sibling to the article renderer)
• Right rail with reviewer's rating, the game's site average and your delta, like/comment/view counts, the author's lifetime stats and a Follow CTA, plus a 'More from {Author}' compact list
• Discovery strip below the body with three other takes on the same game, each linking through to its own page
• Inline comments thread, server-rendered alongside the rest of the page (no more after-mount fetch)
• Card click goes straight to the page everywhere — game detail, profile, landing, /games/reviews. Both reading modals retired

Reviewing gets its own room. The cramped modal is gone, replaced by a dedicated multi-step flow with the smiling-star scale, the platform you played on, and a proper rich-text canvas for the long-form thing.

• Three tiers in one flow: rate only, rate and a TL;DR, or the full long-form review with headings, lists, and inline images
• Ten smiling-star scale at the heart of every review, animated step transitions, and a pinned 'You'll be reviewing' card that fills in as you go
• Reviews now capture which platform you played on, surfaced as a 'Reviewed for' pill once the renderer catches up
• New D-Pad in the masthead for create actions: Add a review and Create a list, designed to grow as more content types ship
• Game-page entry pre-fills the game; the D-Pad entry asks you to pick one first and then drops you into the same canvas

Comments arrive on lists, screenshots, articles, and reviews. Reply, edit, delete, hide, report. Built for engagement without the chaos.

• Comment threads on every user-authored content surface: reviews (in the modal), lists, screenshots, articles
• One-level replies with the data model ready for deeper threading later
• Soft-delete keeps conversations intact when the original poster removes a top-level comment
• Owners and admins can hide individual comments without going through the reports queue
• Notifications for new comments and replies, with user-blocks honoured everywhere
• Reportable via the existing content-reports substrate, surfaced in the admin queue

The roadmap stops being a one-way announcement and starts listening back. Sign in, hit the heart, and watch the order shift toward the things people actually want.

• Vote on roadmap items: upvote-only, click again to take it back
• Items now group by status: In Progress, Planned, Exploring
• Vote counts are public so you can see what's pulling weight
• Shipped items quietly retire to the changelog where they belong

List detail pages grew up. A magazine-style cover-art hero strip, a proper right rail with stats and discovery, and a cleaner header section turn every public list from a plain numbered table into something worth sharing.

• Cover-art hero strip spans the top of every list detail page
• Author bar below the hero: name, last-updated, view count, like button, and owner edit shortcut
• Title and description move below the bar in a larger, more legible layout
• Right rail on desktop: Stats card (Games / Likes / Views), More from the author, and You May Also Like
• Mobile stacks everything in a single column with the stats card lifted before the list contents
• You May Also Like surfaces popularity-ranked public lists from other authors

The site now has a Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and an Ethics page, each in two flavours: a two-minute human-voice read and the proper formal cousin for anyone who wants the details. Linked from the bottom of every page.

• New /privacy, /terms, and /ethics pages, each with a Human ↔ Legal toggle
• Human views in the same medium-gaming voice as /about: short, honest, readable
• Legal views shaped by UK GDPR (privacy), English law (terms), and a formal Editorial Policy for ethics
• Review-integrity pledge on the Ethics page: if we're ever given a review key, no favourable score for pressure or for free copies. Full stop.
• Footer picks up three inline legal links plus a new signature line: built by one man with a ❤️ of gaming and fuelled by coffee

Community screenshots each get their own dedicated page: shareable URL, image-forward OG cards, the works. Upload and edit flows have moved out of modals into proper pages, and screenshots now appear in the sitemap for search engines to index.

• Every user screenshot has a dedicated show-page at /screenshots/[id]
• Upload and edit flows moved from modals to proper full pages
• Spoiler flag: flagged screenshots blur until you hover or open the zoom view
• Sharing a screenshot link to Slack / Discord / Twitter now produces an image-forward preview card
• Screenshots added to the sitemap: indexable long-tail content for the first time

Players can now upload their own screenshots to any game and show them off on their profile. Reports route straight to a new admin moderation queue when something needs a closer look.

• Upload screenshots from any game page: title required, description optional, with a per-game cap to keep galleries tidy
• New 'Community Screenshots' section on every game page, separate from the official IGDB gallery
• New screenshots section on every public profile, plus a dedicated archive page at /users/[name]/screenshots
• Lightbox view with attribution back to the uploader, plus owner-only edit and delete affordances
• Report any screenshot: admins triage in a new moderation queue

The games catalogue picked up a new way to glance at what the community has been rating. A horizontal strip of scored covers now sits between Top Rated and Popular, and a perfect 10 anywhere on the site finally looks the part.

• New LATEST / RATINGS strip on /games: a horizontally-scrollable row of cover art with a score pill under each, showing the most recently rated games
• Gold treatment for 10/10 scores sitewide: review cards, community average pills, and the new ratings strip all render the top score on #f4c430 fill

The site grew a social nervous system. Reviews and lists can be loved, users can follow each other, and a bell in the top nav tells you when the party reacts to your stuff.

• Heart buttons on review and list cards. The old 'helpful' count is now a 'like', wired everywhere reviews live
• Follow other players from their profile, with counts and a 'Follows you' pill on the hero
• New /followers and /following sub-pages on every profile
• Notification bell in the nav: coalesces likes and follows into 'Alex and Sam liked your review' rows; desktop and mobile
• User blocking with a clean cascade: block wipes the follow in both directions and clears pending notifications

Review cards finally got a first-class treatment. Two new variants replaced the three drifted inline copies, scores now come in two tones, and a lightweight reading modal catches anyone who wants the full take without leaving the page.

• Two new shared review cards (portrait for grids, landscape for the featured slot), replacing the inline versions that had drifted across the landing page and the reviews index
• Two-tone score badges: the reviewer's own rating in blue next to the game's community aggregate in teal, so a single take always reads alongside the crowd
• Landing page reviews section capped to half the viewport with a horizontally-scrolling card strip that fades into the surface on the right edge
• /games/reviews leads with a full-width landscape card; the rest form a 1/2/3-col portrait grid, with everything collapsing to portrait on mobile
• READ MORE opens a lightweight reading modal when a body is truncated: title, full body, scores, spoiler blur, and a deep-link back to the game's reviews section for voting and edits

Counts are coming. Game pages, profiles, reviews, and lists now log how many people stop by, quietly, privately, and ready to power the next round of party rails.

• View tracking on games, profiles, reviews, and game lists
• Privacy-respecting: anonymous by default, identified only with analytics consent
• View-count badges land on every detail page; profiles stay owner-only
• Counts are filtered for quality before they surface
• Foundation for upcoming most-viewed rails (no UI yet, collecting baseline data first)

Less new surface, more tuning. The typography got quieter, every public heading got an eyebrow, and the copy settled into a consistent medium-gaming voice.

• Heading font swapped to Objektiv Mk2 with tighter tracking
• New SectionHeader primitive, applied site-wide starting with /community
• Medium-voice copy sweep across discovery, user-scoped, and detail pages (three batches, roughly fifty surfaces)
• Voice and tone guide added to the internal docs

Public profiles went from a sparse card to a full magazine layout, the wishlist finally exists, and the nav grew a mega-menu. A week away and you'd come back to a different site.

• Magazine-layout /users/[username] with hero banner, stats tiles, and widgets for Currently Playing, Backlog, Platform Mix, Top Genres, Ratings Breakdown, Completion, and Activity
• Profile sub-pages for games, reviews, lists, and articles
• Wishlist: new play status, /collection/wishlist page, badge, and profile tab. Kept out of owned-game counts.
• Two-row navigation with page-centred search and a mega-menu
• In-place collection status changes with aligned action rows
• Owner-vs-visitor empty-state voice across every profile section

The scaffolding around the product caught up with the product itself: a design system you can link to, an onboarding flow that doesn't dump new signups on the homepage, and the infrastructure SEO and analytics need.

• /designsystem canvas documenting colours, typography, spacing, cards, buttons, era themes, icons, animations, and known gaps
• Tutorial-Quest onboarding wizard: welcome, profile setup, platform picker, game picker, feature tour
• Cookie consent modal with gtag integration and category-based controls
• Google Analytics wired in, respecting consent defaults
• SEO pass: canonicals, sitemap, robots, and breadcrumbs across listings
• Accessibility sweep: focus states, contrast fixes, and ESRB / PEGI rating icons on game pages

VGDB stopped being a read-only reference and became a place with people. Community, companies, and approval-voted heartbeat charts all arrived the same week.

• /community page with member grid, sort controls, and full-bleed member cards
• Companies hub page with filters, plus public company detail pages with hero, stats, and info panels
• Heartbeat chart fed by per-user +1 / -1 approval votes
• IGDB and Steam importers now link developers and publishers into the companies table
• Company progress cards with sign-in CTA fallback
• Admin company pages with merge UI and self-merge guards

The catalogue grew from 'consoles' to 'consoles and the games you play on them': franchises, series, genres, and a games explorer all shipped the same day.

• Games catalogue tables, types, and validation covering platforms, genres, modes, ratings, franchises, and series
• Admin pages for games, franchises, series, and genres with inline editing
• Public games explorer, game detail pages, and per-platform game tabs
• Franchise and series detail pages
• Server actions for full games CRUD with platform, genre, mode, and rating management

Admin CMS went live, giving us a way to edit 190 consoles without running SQL by hand.

• Admin area with layout shell, sidebar, topbar, and toast provider
• Platform CRUD with a paginated data table, a shared form primitive, and image upload
• Enrichment tabs for history, media, trivia, and story, each with server actions
• Delete confirmation dialogs with cascade impact display
• Extended hardware spec fields surfaced on public pages
• Strict validation across every admin form

The first version anyone could actually use: a browseable fifty-year archive of 190 gaming platforms, with search, timeline, compare, and era-specific visual treatment baked in.

• Platform detail pages with spec tables, family strips, and family breadcrumbs
• Explorer page with instant search, faceted filters, and URL state sync
• Cmd+K fuzzy search palette
• Editorial home page with hero, featured platforms, and a generation grid
• Timeline view with category filtering and a compare page with side-by-side specs
• Era-aware theming (pre-8-bit through modern) with per-family boot animations and pixel loaders

The bones before anything shipped: the project scaffold, the database schema, design tokens, and the seed pipeline that loaded the first 190 platforms.

• Initial project scaffold with the first cut of design tokens, typography, and fonts in place
• Database schema with strict types and a public read client
• Slug, date, and generation helpers that still underpin the URL scheme today
• Seed pipeline with foreign-key resolution, BOM handling, and empty-row filtering
• Query functions for platforms to power the first public pages