List of all games with "standard" avatars?

[u/gabrielwoj]

So, I'm looking for a website (like SteamCardExchange, Steam.Tools or an archival of sorts) which lists every single game that has default avatars / that have every single avatar.

By default game avatars, I am referring to these: https://steamcommunity.com/actions/GameAvatars/

The list above only includes games I recently played, games I own, and a random batch of games I do not own. But it does not show everything.

I'd love to have these profile pictures, and archiving them somewhere, considering the functionality for these could be removed at any point (the page I linked still uses the old Steam layout), and I was unable to find any Steam-related website that has a list of these. SteamDB, SteamCardExchange and Steam.Tools don't have them. I don't think anyone has bothered in archiving them?

I was thinking about a tool where it can check for the string "Click on any of the images below to make it your new profile avatar." in a page, if it does, then save all files which has the ending with "_full.jpg". The tool would go through all of the games AppIDs, and check whether or not that string of text is on the page. If so, it would save the _full.jpg version of an avatar to a folder with the name of the game.

Each one of the games have the URL https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/AppID/Avatar/List , where AppID is the game's ID (440 being Team Fortress 2, for example). It would be possible to make a tool to try each Steam AppID, and any results that include the string above, save the _full files locally to the user's PC. However, considering there are over 500.000 App IDs, I would end up getting rate-limited at some point.

If there is a list with every game that has default avatars, then it would be less problematic and faster, knowing that I wouldn't have to let the program guess what game IDs have them or not.

I love switching profile pictures, but for a while now I have stopped using other artist's work as profile pictures without their permission (I know a lot of people does this, but doesn't mean I should).

Currently, I only use profile pictures that comes from media screenshots, official artworks / renders, or from artists that specify that you are free to use them. Having all the profile pictures published by the game's devs/publishers on Steam would be really handy if I was in the mood for something new.

Sadly, I am no programmer expert, I wouldn't know how to write code to maximize efficiency on the idea I proposed. Unless someone else has already worked on archiving them somewhere, but I was unable to find it.

Thanks!

[u/EssexOnAStick]

Don't think a list like that exists yet, I've thought about making one a few times in the past but in the end never bothered to actually build something. It wouldn't be too hard, just a crawler that goes through each appid and looks at how Steam responds, but due to the rate limiting you mentioned it would just take forever to build the initial index.

[u/gabrielwoj → u/EssexOnAStick]

Do you have any past programming experience or knowledge? I'd love to archive these before Valve decides to pull the plug (it is an ancient Steam feature, after all, even if you are still able to choose from your avatar selector).

I feel like there should be a website that have a string or syntax of sorts that shows what games have these default game avatars, but I haven't found any. Not sure why no one else bothered doing this, possibly because Valve don't have a proper tag for games that have these avatars.

One thing that I thought doing is perhaps a way to "send" an API request to Steam, spoofing that I own every single game on Steam (of course this wouldn't be a hack that would make me own and play these games, just telling Steam servers that I "own" every game ever), therefore, showing every game that has avatars on the https://steamcommunity.com/actions/GameAvatars/ URL. This could be done in parts (1000 AppIDs per instance, for example), since I assume the page wouldn't load or crash if every single game was shown at once.

This would make it easier to know what games have avatars in the first place, so whenever a script / program was ready to be launched, every single AppID with them would be included from the get-go, without having to guess what games have these avatars.

[u/EssexOnAStick → u/gabrielwoj]

I do work as a software engineer, but I have barely anything to do with web stuff, APIs etc. So I have some idea how I'd want to start with it, but if that'd end up working, no idea. It's been always kind of a "if I ever find the energy and motivation to learn something new" project I had in the back of my mind, but nothing more concrete.

[u/gabrielwoj → u/EssexOnAStick]

That's fine. I started getting some of them manually, but I'm probably not going to do the entire thing this way. I have some ideas on how I could obtain them in a more less painful (manual) way, though not as sophisticated as a program with their own sole purpose.

I did notice that, for whatever reason, there are very few games where if you press "View all X avatars", it goes into a page where the "group" doesn't exist.

So in order for me to get avatars for that game, I need to right-click the _medium sized avatars from the page, and change the suffix to _full. That is... is the game has 6 avatars or less. If the game has more than that, then I'd probably need to check archive.org's page to see if it was archived.

As for using archive.org's url searching, sadly this won't be easy considering the same URL that stores default game avatars also stores custom set Steam avatars uploaded by users.

I also posted this on r/datahoarder , since it's a community about archiving that sort of thing.