{"id":2365,"date":"2024-02-20T11:20:00","date_gmt":"2024-02-20T11:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jameshatton.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2365"},"modified":"2024-02-28T00:19:06","modified_gmt":"2024-02-28T00:19:06","slug":"xbox-discounts-as-csv-file","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jameshatton.co.uk\/blog\/2024\/02\/20\/xbox-discounts-as-csv-file\/","title":{"rendered":"Xbox Discounts as CSV File"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> but I need a method to manage the few hundred titles that may appear in the weekly or special event Xbox sales.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I need to get the games in a format I can work with. Fortunately the website xbox-now.com<\/a> lists all the current Xbox discounts via their deal list<\/a> as below:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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<\/span> 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 \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here it is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n