Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Decline Valve killed Steam Spy but it's gradually coming back

Nael

Arcane
Joined
Dec 12, 2005
Messages
11,384
Location
Indy
They may think it's funny to kill Steam Spy, but it won't be so funny when I kill their wives and children.

c3p8yhlnpqkx.png
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
To be honest, I always found Steamcharts a more relevant measure -- Steamspy varied so wildly and was so distorted by giveaway bundles, where people never even played the game, that it tended to be pretty misleading. Reviews and Steamcharts are pretty decent measures still. Still, it's sad -- I always thought Primordia would someday manage to overtake Blackwell Deception (despite its having been given away for free for a week) to make it #2 on the Wadjet Eye roster. Alas, we are now frozen in Deception being at the top of its up-cycle on Steamspy and Primordia being at the bottom. :D
 
Joined
May 6, 2009
Messages
1,875,975
Location
Glass Fields, Ruins of Old Iran
:despair:

How are we going to taunt SJWs with terrible sales data of their poster boy youngperson games now?

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/04/11/steam-privacy-changes-block-steamspy/

Andrew said:
Forget about SteamSpy (dude who runs it is not that against gg, just sayin’), what about my achievement tracking websites?! My cheevos!

Joking aside, everything would work if you set that stuff to public. And it was like that before, so don’t panic

:M

edit: christ

sleepisthebrotherofdeath said:
Just like Facebook I’ll be setting my profile to globally readable. On the internet there is no such thing as privacy, everything will be leaked eventually.

Andrew said:
Ew, no, stop leaking everywhere! I don’t want your dick pics. Set your private to private, private.

(for the joke purposes I’m assuming your gender, no offence)
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-04-11-why-steam-spy-has-to-close-from-the-creator-himself

Why Steam Spy has to close, from the creator himself
"I knew it was going to happen at some point."

Yesterday, Steam's privacy settings were updated to make things a little clearer when deciding who can see your Steam profile and what exactly they can see. This means that you can now hide the games you've purchased or wishlisted, along with any achievements and playtime you may have associated with them.

At first glance, this appears to be Valve's initial response to the huge privacy scandal surrounding Facebook's relationship with British political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica. (We've asked Valve for comment.)

jpg

Sergey Galyonkin, creator of Steam Spy and Director of Publishing Strategy at Epic Games.

However, these changes have also led to a potentially unexpected side effect: the imminent closure of the largest Steam stats service on the Internet, Steam Spy.

This site ran as a side project by Sergey Galyonkin, the Director of Publishing Strategy at Epic Games, and relies entirely on data gathered from Steam user profiles to estimate sales figures and current trends within the PC gaming space. This has proven popular with players and developers alike.

Galyonkin announced yesterday that Steam Spy "won't be able to operate anymore", as a result of these changes. We spoke to him to find out more.

How's it all going on your end?

Sergey Galyonkin: Well, I'm trying to figure out what would be my next best step. It seems like I have several options, relying on different methods of gathering information. But the margin of error would be so high that I don't think they make a lot of sense.

So what happened yesterday, from your perspective? Did you know this update was coming?

Sergey Galyonkin: No, I did not. I just found out about it when a person messaged me on Twitter. Valve never informs anyone of any changes, so it's not surprising really. What they did was post it in their blog post, while rolling out their privacy changes. They made users' game libraries hidden by default and that's what makes Steam Spy operate. Steam Spy uses user libraries to understand what users have and then extrapolate data based on that. I don't know why they did it.

Do you get the feeling that this change has happened because of Steam Spy?

Sergey Galyonkin: I really don't know. For a moment I was thinking that it was related to GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) laws going live in Europe in May, but if they wanted to be compliant with those laws they should have hidden all profile information. Right now they have sensitive information exposed by default and only the game libraries are hidden. It doesn't really make sense.

What kind of sensitive information?

Sergey Galyonkin: The user's real name, twitter handles and all this stuff. It's all exposed by default.

jpg

So does that suggest this update was, in fact, targeting Steam Spy?

Sergey Galyonkin: I mean, there are easier ways to block Steam Spy. If I understand correctly, what they did also broke the ability for players to join their friends in games, because they can't see who owns what. I think if they wanted to just shut down Steam Spy, they would have taken an easier route.

And I'm guessing you've had no correspondence with Valve?

Sergey Galyonkin: No. My previous experience with Valve is that they don't answer any emails.

Have you got any kind of relationship with them? Before this point, have you talked to them about Steam Spy at all?

Sergey Galyonkin: Before launching Steam Spy, I used to work with Valve because I worked for a company that released a couple of game on Steam. Back then, it was way before Greenlight started, they were quick to answer. But after Greenlight happened, they stopped replying.

When I launched Steam Spy, I was met with complete silence. I've only received one email related to Steam Spy from them.

What was that email?

Sergey Galyonkin: It was when I asked them if I could make Steam Spy a commercial enterprise. They said I would be fine on Patreon, but not with anything else.

As of right now, where are you at? Are you really shutting Steam Spy down?

Sergey Galyonkin: I will probably shut down the Patreon, because I feel it's unfair to charge people for access to past information, without new information going in. I have an option to continue with other methods of extrapolation. They will be less precise. So if I do it, I will just keep that information to myself, I guess. I've seen information with account-level precision being misused, I don't want information with less precision being misused as well. So I will just use it myself.

jpg

What kind of margin of error is acceptable for you, when looking at alternatives?

Sergey Galyonkin: It depends, you know. It's different for me and for other people. Myself, I usually look at trends. Other people, I see use Steam Spy quite differently, they search particular games. The margin of error for particular games would be kind of bad.

So as of right now, unless another method presents itself, the public face of Steam Spy is done?

Sergey Galyonkin: Yeah, pretty much. I will keep the archive online.

As well as doing Steam Spy, you work at Epic Games. So this isn't the be all and end all for you?

Sergey Galyonkin: No, no. Steam Spy was a nice side source of income, but I was not doing it for the money. I'm good.

How does Epic feel about Steam Spy? Have they ever had any issues with it?

Sergey Galyonkin: Not really. I had a clause in my contract that allows me to run a couple of side projects: one of them is Steam Spy and the other is a game developers podcast I run. Epic was cool about it and we use Steam Spy ourselves a lot. It has been a good source of information for us.

So what's next? Will you move onto another side project?

Sergey Galyonkin: I will probably continue with the version of Steam Spy that I intend to use myself, but I will probably not make it public.

So that's something you'll just use to inform your own role at Epic?

Sergey Galyonkin: Yeah. I also have something called Twitch Spy, which is pretty much a database with no front end. It allows me to check on people's streaming, the games that are being streamed, who's rising and who's not. How subscriber counts and follower counts are influenced by the games they play. It's actually rather interesting. You can see that sometimes a person will be jumping from game to game to game and certain games will perform extremely well for them. And sometimes different people, trying to stream the exact same game, will see a decrease in followers. It's fascinating to watch, but right now it's just a database with no front end. I might do that, if I have time.

And finally, what do you make of the argument that this change is actually good for Steam users in terms of privacy?

Sergey Galyonkin: Giving users a small amount of control over their privacy settings is a step in the right direction. Making all of interface changes they've done is a good step. But the fact that they made only partial information from user profiles, rather than hiding all sensitive information is obviously weird. I don't understand why they'd do that. But I mean, it's Valve...

Thanks for your time Sergey. You seem remarkably calm given the last 24 hours.

Sergey Galyonkin: I knew it was going to happen at some point. It wasn't exactly a big surprise. And I still have a small side project called Fortnite to think about anyway.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.pcgamesn.com/game-devs-react-steam-privacy-change

Game developers mourn Steam Spy: "it's possible that more devs will quit"

Steam Spy, an independent website that scraped Steam user data to give a (rough) overview of PC gaming’s biggest platform, is dead. It was killed by changes to your profile’s privacy settings that will now hide your game library by default.

This has big implications for videogame developers. We spoke with several of them to get their thoughts.

“As a developer, Steam Spy was a very useful tool to research the size of various niches and to estimate the success of other games,” says Chris Wilson, lead designer on Path of Exile. This sentiment was echoed by more or less everyone, with Charles Griffiths, design director at Sexy Brutale devs Cavalier, noting that “developers certainly benefit as it means they are not completely reliant on their publisher’s provided figures.”

Hence, almost everyone was pessimistic about a future without Steam Spy. Wilson says devs will “have to rely on more expensive market research methods to validate whether there’s an audience for the type of game they want to make”. As Steam Spy’s creator, Sergey Galyonkin, told us, this will obviously hurt indies far more than triple-A.

Paul Kilduff-Taylor, of Mode 7 Games, went further: “There are a lot of horror stories from devs and negative perceptions from players around at the moment - without being able to get some objective verification of how the market is behaving, it’s possible that more devs will quit.”

steamspy_0.jpg


Valve say the move is a response to user feedback, and Raúl Rubio Munárriz, CEO of Tequila Works, was one of several devs to acknowledge that “users have been demanding more privacy for some time.”

While this is true, the timing is interesting, with new EU privacy laws (GDPR) due to come into force next month and Facebook embroiled in a global privacy scandal. Galyonkin says the change still doesn’t make Steam GDPR-compliant, though.

“Steam Spy’s existence was always predicated on scraping data which was not explicitly intended to reveal sales information,” says Kilduff-Taylor, “so it’s not that surprising it has been taken down by a general tightening up of privacy.”

This touches on an important point: Steam Spy was hardly an optimal solution to the problems it sought to address. As it freely admitted, it was prone to large margins of error due to the way it gathered its data. Griffiths says “the fact that there is so little public data on digital sales available that many people rely on a service like Steam Spy is already not the healthiest situation.”

steamspy.png


Is it possible to get digital sales tracking that is precise and discrete? Kilduff-Taylor says “I know there is a push for more accurate tracking of digital sales and I think, overall, that’s definitely a good thing. Whether that should constitute absolutely every game’s sales data being fully public by default is another matter - there is some nuance there.”

And who is better positioned than Valve themselves to step up? Kilduff-Taylor points out that they “already publish a list of their top sellers for the entire year - it’d be nice to see that sort of information expanded, at least.”

Brian Fargo - an industry veteran and exec producer on Torment: Tides of Numenera - agrees: “I do hope that Steam decides to offer much of the same data [as Steam Spy], as I found it to be a net positive for the industry; it provided gamers with knowledge such as CCU to decide on a purchase and it helped developers get a rough idea of royalties owed and how well genres were performing.”

Steam%20Ricochet.png


While imperfect, Steam Spy was very useful to developers. Its loss is likely to hit indies hardest, which surely Valve don’t want to see. Indeed, Fargo was so surprised by this decision that he wondered if it might have been “an unintended effect of some broader issue that Steam was trying to accommodate for.”

We won’t speculate as to whether Valve had any other reasons than the ones they stated for making this change. It can clearly be said that many devs have come to rely on Steam Spy, especially indies, and those we spoke with are concerned for the state of the industry if no-one steps forward to provide similar data.
 

IHaveHugeNick

Arcane
Joined
Apr 5, 2015
Messages
1,870,124
Yeah I don't see what's the big deal honestly. I'd rather have steam privacy than steam sales tracking. The only purpose of SteamSpy was for fanboy wars anyway.

I mean, I'm sure some shovelware developers found the data useful, but duh, welcome to the real world, market research is expensive, that's why bigger companies have it and you don't. Get a real job and you will have separate department doing it.
 

McPlusle

Savant
Joined
May 11, 2017
Messages
319
Is this due to privacy rulings or entitled devs who can't stand customers knowing their games failed?
 

Heretic

Cipher
Joined
Dec 1, 2015
Messages
844
Next step: Building a service akin to SteamSpy on a representative sample of several (tens of) thousand users and some statistics.
Like Nielsen ratings
http://www.nielsen.com/eu/en/solutions/measurement/television.html

Let them share their Steam profile page with you, or even better let them install a background program that measures all games, not only games on Steam. DRM-free, Origin, custom launchers...
 

bataille

Arcane
Joined
Feb 11, 2017
Messages
1,073
Just ask math dudes to derive some sort of correlation between the number of steam reviews and units sold, and use that formula to estimate sales! To work!
 

Alienman

Retro-Fascist
Patron
Joined
Sep 10, 2014
Messages
17,046
Location
Mars
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Man, most disappointing thing is that you can hide your games played now, and that it is on by default. I don't care what people play in general, but I love to check developers and journalists to see if they actually play any games. Now every journo will hide that information.

Decline.
 

Forest Dweller

Smoking Dicks
Joined
Oct 29, 2008
Messages
12,196
https://www.pcgamesn.com/game-devs-react-steam-privacy-change

Game developers mourn Steam Spy: "it's possible that more devs will quit"

Steam Spy, an independent website that scraped Steam user data to give a (rough) overview of PC gaming’s biggest platform, is dead. It was killed by changes to your profile’s privacy settings that will now hide your game library by default.

This has big implications for videogame developers. We spoke with several of them to get their thoughts.

“As a developer, Steam Spy was a very useful tool to research the size of various niches and to estimate the success of other games,” says Chris Wilson, lead designer on Path of Exile. This sentiment was echoed by more or less everyone, with Charles Griffiths, design director at Sexy Brutale devs Cavalier, noting that “developers certainly benefit as it means they are not completely reliant on their publisher’s provided figures.”

Hence, almost everyone was pessimistic about a future without Steam Spy. Wilson says devs will “have to rely on more expensive market research methods to validate whether there’s an audience for the type of game they want to make”. As Steam Spy’s creator, Sergey Galyonkin, told us, this will obviously hurt indies far more than triple-A.

Paul Kilduff-Taylor, of Mode 7 Games, went further: “There are a lot of horror stories from devs and negative perceptions from players around at the moment - without being able to get some objective verification of how the market is behaving, it’s possible that more devs will quit.”

steamspy_0.jpg


Valve say the move is a response to user feedback, and Raúl Rubio Munárriz, CEO of Tequila Works, was one of several devs to acknowledge that “users have been demanding more privacy for some time.”

While this is true, the timing is interesting, with new EU privacy laws (GDPR) due to come into force next month and Facebook embroiled in a global privacy scandal. Galyonkin says the change still doesn’t make Steam GDPR-compliant, though.

“Steam Spy’s existence was always predicated on scraping data which was not explicitly intended to reveal sales information,” says Kilduff-Taylor, “so it’s not that surprising it has been taken down by a general tightening up of privacy.”

This touches on an important point: Steam Spy was hardly an optimal solution to the problems it sought to address. As it freely admitted, it was prone to large margins of error due to the way it gathered its data. Griffiths says “the fact that there is so little public data on digital sales available that many people rely on a service like Steam Spy is already not the healthiest situation.”

steamspy.png


Is it possible to get digital sales tracking that is precise and discrete? Kilduff-Taylor says “I know there is a push for more accurate tracking of digital sales and I think, overall, that’s definitely a good thing. Whether that should constitute absolutely every game’s sales data being fully public by default is another matter - there is some nuance there.”

And who is better positioned than Valve themselves to step up? Kilduff-Taylor points out that they “already publish a list of their top sellers for the entire year - it’d be nice to see that sort of information expanded, at least.”

Brian Fargo - an industry veteran and exec producer on Torment: Tides of Numenera - agrees: “I do hope that Steam decides to offer much of the same data [as Steam Spy], as I found it to be a net positive for the industry; it provided gamers with knowledge such as CCU to decide on a purchase and it helped developers get a rough idea of royalties owed and how well genres were performing.”

Steam%20Ricochet.png


While imperfect, Steam Spy was very useful to developers. Its loss is likely to hit indies hardest, which surely Valve don’t want to see. Indeed, Fargo was so surprised by this decision that he wondered if it might have been “an unintended effect of some broader issue that Steam was trying to accommodate for.”

We won’t speculate as to whether Valve had any other reasons than the ones they stated for making this change. It can clearly be said that many devs have come to rely on Steam Spy, especially indies, and those we spoke with are concerned for the state of the industry if no-one steps forward to provide similar data.
So in addition to killing Steamspy, a lot of developers in their embryonic stages will also be killed off...sort of like an abortion.

This just keeps getting better and better.
 

Tehdagah

Arcane
Joined
Feb 27, 2012
Messages
9,236
Man, most disappointing thing is that you can hide your games played now, and that it is on by default. I don't care what people play in general, but I love to check developers and journalists to see if they actually play any games. Now every journo will hide that information.

Decline.
Also checking out how much time a reviewer played a game.
 

Max Stats

Liturgist
Joined
Nov 26, 2016
Messages
1,091
i don't get all the fuss about facebook lately. we knew since the beginning it worked like that, why are people surprised now? i'm not the one who coined "if the product is free, then you're the product".

Evil people using Facebook to help trump's election. You know doing just what the media called genius and glorious when Obama's people did the same thing a few years earlier...
 

J1M

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2008
Messages
14,616
i don't get all the fuss about facebook lately. we knew since the beginning it worked like that, why are people surprised now? i'm not the one who coined "if the product is free, then you're the product".
It's top of mind because european privacy laws go into effect next month. It's this decade's Y2K.
 
Last edited:

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom