gaming-research

Gaming research

Look up game store listings, pricing, reviews, and player counts across Steam and the PlayStation Store as normalized JSON from the Crawlora API — no scraping storefront pages.

When to use this skill

• "What does cost / how is it rated?"
• "How many people are playing right now?" (Steam player counts)
• "What's trending / most played / top sellers right now?"
• "What's on sale?" (Steam or PlayStation deals)
• "Find games in <genre/tag>" or "similar to ."

Setup (one-time)

• Get a free Crawlora API key (2,000 credits/mo, no card) at https://crawlora.net.
• Set CRAWLORA_API_KEY in the environment before running the helper.
• The helper reads CRAWLORA_API_KEY from the environment and sends requests to https://api.crawlora.net/api/v1. Missing/invalid key → 401.

How it works

1. Steam — /steam/search (term) to find an appid, then /steam/app for the store page, /steam/reviews (+ /reviews/histogram) for review data, /steam/players for the current concurrent player count, /steam/news for updates, /steam/achievements for the achievement list. /steam/charts/most-played, /steam/charts/concurrent, /steam/charts/top-releases, /steam/top-sellers, and /steam/featured cover trending/what's-hot; /steam/tags and /steam/category/{slug} filter by genre/tag.
2. PlayStation — /playstation/search (term) to find a product id, then /playstation/product for detail, /playstation/concept for a game's overall franchise/concept page, /playstation/category to browse a category, /playstation/deals for current discounts, /playstation/latest for new releases.

Full endpoint list, methods, and params: reference/endpoints.md.

Calling the API

# Steam:
scripts/crawlora.sh /steam/search term="Hades" | jq '.'
scripts/crawlora.sh /steam/app appid=1145360 | jq '.'
scripts/crawlora.sh /steam/players appid=1145360 | jq '.'

# PlayStation:
scripts/crawlora.sh /playstation/search term="Spider-Man" | jq '.'
scripts/crawlora.sh /playstation/deals | jq '.'

Use scripts/crawlora.sh for all requests; it keeps the API key out of command-line arguments.

Endpoint reference

See reference/endpoints.md for every Steam and PlayStation endpoint this skill uses.

Examples

• Buy-decision brief: /steam/app (price, tags) + /steam/reviews/histogram (rating distribution) + /steam/players (is it still active) in one pass.
• What's hot right now: /steam/charts/most-played + /steam/top-sellers cross-checked against /playstation/latest for console releases.
• Sale-hunting: /steam/featured (specials) + /playstation/deals for the same title across both storefronts.

Notes & limits

• Credits / pay-on-success: billed only on 2xx; free tier 2,000 credits/mo. Key at https://crawlora.net.
• Public data only — public store/review pages.
• Security: key lives in CRAWLORA_API_KEY only — never hardcode, query-param, or commit it.
• Steam pricing/availability is region-specific — pass cc (country code) and l (language) where supported to match a specific storefront.
• Resolve names to platform ids via .../search before calling a detail endpoint.