Acknowledgements

Big thanks to everyone and everything that made this chaotic repo possible.

People & Platforms

Valve / Steam — for existing and having a ton of free-to-play games that keep broke people like the maintainer entertained. The Steam logo, store, community, VAC, and all related marks are trademarks of Valve Corporation; this project is independent and not affiliated.
GitHub — for free hosting (data, Pages, Actions, Releases), free CI for the Python pipeline + the web app deploy + the desktop release matrix builds, and for letting unemployed devs pretend they're productive.
Steam Charts (steamcharts.com) — for the all-time peak player counts. The pipeline reads each game's recorded peak from its public page, about once a month per game and a few seconds apart. Not affiliated with this project.
The Steam community & various review aggregators — for reviews, tags, and metadata that the pipeline scrapes off public store pages. Where copy-paste happens it stays attributed.
Caffeine & instant noodles — the real MVPs keeping the maintainer awake during update sessions.

AI assistance (the elephant in the repo)

About 70 % of the code in this repo was generated, refactored, or rubber-ducked with the help of LLM assistants. Code is reviewed and tested before each commit, but mistakes happen — see the four caveats in DISCLAIMER.md and the GPG-signing fixes in v3.0's CHANGELOG (we shipped two wrong commit-bytes formats before getting it right).

Era	Who	What it touched
v1 (2025)	Grok (xAI)	Initial Python pipeline scaffolding, ingest workflow, daily-update Action, README v1.
v2 (2026 Q1)	Claude (Anthropic)	Modular refactor under `scripts/core/`, schema v2.1 + v2.2, the HTML scraper, the health checker, performance work.
v3.0 web app + desktop (2026 Q2)	Claude	The entire `web/` SPA across phases 1 → 7, the GPG signing pipeline (and its three follow-up fixes), the optimistic-cache layer, the Tauri 2 desktop scaffold + release workflow, the refreshed legal docs, and this CHANGELOG entry.

No user data is sent to any LLM at runtime. The AI calls happen on the maintainer's dev machine while writing code, never from a visitor's browser.

Third-party dependencies

Hosted services the website loads at runtime — the only code in this project that comes from someone else's server rather than from the bundle:

Cloudflare Web Analytics — a cookieless page-view count, loaded from static.cloudflareinsights.com only after the visitor accepts the terms, and never in the desktop or Android apps. docs/PRIVACY_POLICY.md describes exactly what it does; web/src/lib/analytics.ts is the ten lines that load it.
Cloudflare Turnstile — the human check, loaded from challenges.cloudflare.com only after the visitor accepts the terms, at most once a day, and never in the desktop or Android apps. docs/PRIVACY_POLICY.md describes what it processes; web/src/lib/turnstile.ts loads it and web/worker/routes/human-check.ts verifies its token.

Everything below ships inside the bundle.

The Python pipeline relies on two libraries:

requests — Apache-2.0
urllib3 — MIT

The web app and the desktop/Android wrapper depend on a longer list. The in-app About → Stack & third-party section shows the headline ones with links and licences; this is the whole list, grouped by what it does.

Framework & build

Svelte 5 + SvelteKit 2 — UI runtime and app framework, with adapter-static (all MIT).
TypeScript 7 — type system (Apache-2.0); the native compiler type-checks the code, and TypeScript 6 stays alongside it for the Svelte tooling, which needs its JavaScript API.
Vite 8, powered by the Rolldown bundler, and @sveltejs/vite-plugin-svelte (MIT).
Tailwind CSS 4 via @tailwindcss/vite (MIT). Tailwind 4 is a Vite plugin, so there is no PostCSS step and no tailwind.config.ts.

Styling helpers

tailwind-merge — class merging (MIT).
clsx — conditional class join (MIT).
class-variance-authority — variant API (Apache-2.0).

Bits UI — headless dialog/popover/select primitives for Svelte (MIT).
@lucide/svelte — icons (ISC).
svelte-sonner — toasts (MIT).
@tanstack/svelte-virtual — the virtualised game table (MIT).

Data

idb-keyval — IndexedDB wrapper for the offline catalogue (Apache-2.0).
Fuse.js — fuzzy search (Apache-2.0).

Charts

Apache ECharts 6 (Apache-2.0).
echarts-wordcloud — wordcloud series (ISC). Its peer range still names echarts 5; package.json carries an overrides entry rather than pinning echarts back.

Legal documents

unified with remark-parse, remark-gfm, remark-rehype, rehype-sanitize, rehype-slug and rehype-stringify — markdown to HTML (all MIT). These run at BUILD time only, so no parser or sanitizer reaches the browser.

Offline

Workbox via @vite-pwa/sveltekit — service worker and precache (MIT). Web only: the packaged apps never register one.

Typefaces

Bricolage Grotesque, IBM Plex Sans and JetBrains Mono, self-hosted through @fontsource-variable (all OFL-1.1).

Desktop and Android (Tauri 2)

Tauri 2 — the Rust shell around the same web build; dual-licensed MIT/Apache-2.0.
Plugins: shell (external links), and desktop-only updater, single-instance and process.
Rust crates: serde, serde_json, tauri-build (all MIT/Apache-2.0).

Dev-only tooling — dead-code detectors, type checkers, dependency auditors — ships with nothing and is listed separately in THIRD_PARTY.md.

Maintainer

poli0981 / SkullMute — the unemployed Vietnamese maintainer. ~30 % effort: occasionally opens Steam, scrolls the F2P section, queues new entries, plays on Easy to "verify" (verification level: noob / 10). Sometimes forgets for weeks. The other ~70 % is the AI assistants above plus the daily GitHub Actions cron doing data-refresh work while the maintainer sleeps.

Tools

IDE: whichever opens fastest with the darkest theme. VS Code most of the time.
Other "tools": boredom, procrastination, sale addiction, and the eternal "hôm nay chơi free cái gì đây?".
Steam library of 400+ games (80 % bought on sale under $10) for "research purposes".

Contributing