I own a fair old number of Xbox games so when the weekly or special sales come about I need a quick way to see which titles would interest me. I wrote a small Python program to aid me.
When I say ‘fair old number’, I mean that I have a few thousand games (digital and physical) across the Xbox, Wii U and PC platforms. While I enjoy playing video games, I’m not a collector and so I don’t particular derive satisfaction from organising my library – it’s just a necessity. I track my games on rawg.io but I need a method to manage the few hundred titles that may appear in the weekly or special event Xbox sales.
Video games are expensive (they always have been really) so a list helps me avoid buying the same game twice (different editions or on different platforms) or is a way I can wishlist items for when I don’t have to pay the early adopter premium. I will happily play games released over the last decade so the sales are great for me but even if I spent just one minute looking at a title, when Xbox release 800 titles with discounts, that would take me a day to go through.
Here’s my lo-fi solution. I just build up a spreadsheet of game titles. If I haven’t come across a title before, I’ll look at its store page, reviews etc. and decide if I want it. I classify titles as
1: Definitely buy, 2: Maybe buy, 3: Wait for lower Price 4: Don’t buy, 5: On Game Pass 6: Already Own
As this list grows (currently there’s over 6,000 titles) then each new batch in the sales can quickly get sorted against it (using vlookups). So basically, when there were a few hundred games in the Christmas sales it took only seconds to weed out the games I don’t want to buy, already own or are available on Game Pass. Perfect so then I just spent an hour looking at those I may be interested in.
But I need to get the games in a format I can work with. Fortunately the website xbox-now.com lists all the current Xbox discounts via their deal list as below:
I copy this information by highlighting the text of the last listing, holding shift and highlighting text of the first listing (so it highlights all the listings) and then I copy it (CTRL+C) and past into Notepad (CTRL+V) to get rid of any non-text elements. The result looks like this:
This data is messy so I need another method of converting this list of fields into something I can easily import into Excel. I wrote a small Python program to convert this data into a list of comma-separated values (CSV). Not only has the program ‘grown organically’ but it changes often because xbox-now.com seem to regularly change how they present the data. Nevertheless, it may be useful for someone 😉
Here it is:
Steps:
- Visit https://www.xbox-now.com/en/deal-list in a regular web browser.
- Ensure filters are used and the currency settings are correct for GBP.
- Highlight the bottom listing, hold Shift and highlight the top listing and then copy (CTRL+C) to clipboard.
- Paste into the PasteHere of the embedded Python trinket above tab and run the program.
- Save the output in export.csv tab to your computer.