Trending, Hidden Gems, New Arrivals: what's actually different

2026-09-29

The homepage has three shelves that all technically answer "show me more games," and it's fair to wonder whether they're actually doing different jobs or just three names for the same shuffle. They are doing different jobs — just not the ones the names might suggest at first glance.

Trending isn't "popular"

Trending is closer to "popular right now, and gaining" than "popular, period." A game with a huge lifetime play count but flat or falling recent activity won't sit at the top of it — something newer with real current momentum will beat it. That's deliberate: a shelf that just froze on last month's winners would stop being useful for exactly the thing it's for, which is "what's actually happening on the site right now."

Hidden Gems has a floor, not a ceiling

This is the one people most often assume is just "stuff nobody's found yet," which is half right. The actual rule is narrower: a game only qualifies once it scores at least 80 out of 100 on quality, and hasn't already broken into Trending. So it's not "obscure games" in general — a mediocre, obscure game doesn't get in here either. It's specifically the games that are genuinely good by the numbers but haven't caught fire yet, which is a smaller and more useful set than "everything we haven't promoted."

New Arrivals is exactly what it says, with one catch

This one really is close to its name — recently published, ordered by how recent. The catch is the same cross-shelf rule that applies everywhere on the homepage: nothing shows up twice. If a game is new and already trending, it shows up in Trending and gets skipped here, not duplicated into both. Trending is checked first, so a genuinely hot new release "steals" its own slot from New Arrivals — which is the right outcome even though it means New Arrivals sometimes looks a little quieter than the raw import log would suggest.

A concrete case

Say a game gets published today, scores well above the quality floor, and picks up a real early audience within its first day. Day one, it's brand new with a growing play count but not yet enough volume to out-rank the current Trending leaders — so it shows up in New Arrivals. A few days in, if the momentum holds, it crosses into Trending and drops out of New Arrivals entirely, even though nothing about the game changed. It never touches Hidden Gems at all, because by the time it's established enough to clearly clear the quality bar, it's usually already trending — Hidden Gems tends to catch the ones that are quietly good rather than the ones that immediately took off.