I’ve been playing around with mapping steam games + their reviews based on Qwen embeddings. I revisit this project every year around this time to see what improvements I can make to make a “better” map than last year (According to my own preferences). [0/1]

One thing I learned this year is that naive text mapping (embed a corpus of reviews with a Qwen embedding model, use umap to plot, then compare where things fall) primarily compares embedded text length more than anything else. What a review says affects the position less than how long the review is.

This was a little surprising to me. For whatever reason, I didn’t think the embedding would so strongly describe the length of the embedded passage. So most of this year’s time was spent fixing that artifact.

[0]: 2025’s map: https://storage.danieltperry.me/share/steam-map/

[1]: 2026’s map (still a work in progress, both the ui and the review processing are incomplete): https://storage.danieltperry.me/share/steam-map-refresh/