Game Scout

Overview

Game Scout is a PlayStation game discovery app. Instead of relying only on genres, it uses themes, mechanics, player modes, and niche SEO landing pages to help people find games that fit a very specific mood or use case.

What started as an AI-heavy idea became a much simpler product: searchable filters, curated landing pages, and game detail pages that are easier to ship, test, and improve.

The Problem

Traditional game search platforms only match exact keywords. If you search for "medical games," you might only get games with "medical" in the title, missing out on surgery simulators, hospital management games, and health education titles.

The second problem was getting users at all. I spent a long time building features, but the real challenge turned out to be acquisition and helping search visitors go deeper than one landing page.

The Solution

Game Scout uses advanced categorization:

Search: Find games by tag, theme, mechanics, or description
Ordering: Order games with weighted rating algorithm
Advanced Filters: Combine co-op mode, player count, difficulty, and specific mechanics
Plus Mode: Find games that support specific features like local co-op, split-screen
SEO Landing Pages: Create narrow pages like medical, crime, detective, and co-op RPG games
Discovery Tracking: Measure whether search visitors continue to game pages instead of bouncing

Key Features

Advanced Filters

Player Modes: Single-player, co-op, local-multiplayer etc.
Game Mechanics: story-driven, crafting, turn-based, stealth
Plus Filters: Included in PS Plus, Extra or Free games

Smart Ranking System

Weighted Rating Algorithm: Uses both rating score and rating count to find truly great games
Prevents high-rated games with only few reviews from dominating results
Balances popularity with quality to surface hidden gems
Customizable sorting by best-rated, most popular, or balanced score

Smart Categorization

Automatically categorizes games into 50+ mechanics and themes
Games can belong to multiple categories
Genre-blending discovery (find games that mix your favorite styles)

SEO and Discovery

Landing pages target specific PlayStation search intents instead of generic category terms
Page metadata is tuned based on Google Search Console impressions, clicks, and CTR
Umami tracks search-driven discovery actions so I can see if landing pages lead to deeper browsing

Precise Discovery

Combine multiple filters to find exactly what you want:

"4-player local co-op puzzle games"
"Story-driven action games"
"Medical simulation games"

Technical Highlights

Frontend: Next.js
Backend: Python
Database: Postgres
Scraping: Playwright
Tagging: OpenAI
Analytics: Umami

Recent Progress

Since my last Game Scout post on January 5, 2026, the project has moved less in the "more features" direction and more in the "find out what actually works" direction.

In January 2026 I added Umami tracking, scroll depth, time-on-page, and comparison-related events.
In April 2026 I improved top landing pages, retargeted weak metadata, and fixed a few mobile UX issues on discovery pages.
Search Console for January 15, 2026 to April 14, 2026 showed 132 clicks and 12,462 impressions, with the medical games page still leading.
Umami showed that some search visitors now continue into deeper actions like game views, game card clicks, and other SEO discovery events.

Current State

The app works, I use it myself, and it is finally getting some real search traffic. It is still small, but now I have something better than guesses: Search Console shows which pages are getting impressions and clicks, and Umami shows whether those visitors actually explore the product after landing.

Right now the main challenge is not building more filters. It is improving CTR on the pages that already have impressions and making sure those visitors continue to game pages instead of leaving immediately.