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

[Nael]

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!

THAT IS SO STUPID IT JUST MIGHT WORK!

 

[DavidBVal]

Correlation between sales and reviews is usually 1:90, but I have seen cases of 1:35 and 1:120. It is a far less accurate measure than Steamspy.

A sad day, indeed.

For developers this really sucks. Having *some* sales volume info from similar games, even if it isn't 100% accurate, was an essential part of deciding to start working on a game for years. We're talking of a huge effort for indies and a lot of uncertainty involved, so every little bit of data certainly helps. I can imagine those seeking investors will now have it even worse.

It is also very inconvenient not being able to check hours played/achievements from people asking questions on discussions, but it is not the end of the world as you can at least still see if they own the game (but maybe they will "fix" that too, and then we'll be giving support to pirates and trolls, yay!)

 

[LESS T_T]

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...r-warns-pc-market-is-once-again-open-to-abuse

SteamSpy creator warns PC market is once again open to abuse
“Imagine signing a basketball player without knowing his past performance,” posits Sergey Galyonkin


The sudden loss of SteamSpy was a massive shock for most users - but not for its creator.

Sergey Galyonkin, Epic Games' director of publishing strategy, started the site as a side project back in 2015, and it soon became an invaluable resource for developers and publishers around the world. It was always assumed that Valve was unhappy about Steam sales data being estimated so openly - and largely accurately - but it never seemed to make any direct move to counter-act it.

Yet an unannounced change in this week's update to Steam's privacy settings cut off a primary stream of data, spelling the end for SteamSpy.

"I was surprised that Valve allowed it to operate for almost three years. I knew at some point they would shut it down," Galyonkin tells GamesIndustry.biz.

"It's not usually the sort of company to cave to external pressure, but Valve has been making changes over the past year that have affected SteamSpy. I was always able to adapt, and even in this case I still have enough information to extrapolate the data, but with less precision and a higher margin for error."

This doesn't leave us completely in the dark, but visibility has been significantly impaired given the cost of the alternatives - unfathomably for many of indie developers and publishers, which rely on Steam as a major market.

"You can order surveys from any number of companies who do all this stuff, but that might be $50,000 to $100,000 depending on how much you want to cover and the precision you want, and that process will take several months," Galyonkin observes.

"As a big company, like EA-size, you can still do that and companies I've worked for have never shied away from paying that sort of money for accessible information. Obviously as an indie, you could spare $30 per month for SteamSpy subscription, but you can't spare $100,000 to research any given game in the market. You can't take six months on that survey because you have a game to develop and bills to pay."

It's here that the impact of SteamSpy's closure becomes clear, particularly for smaller, less cash-rich companies. Preventing the site from continuing its analysis has demolished the level playing field it was attempting to create, making it riskier for ambitious developers to disrupt the market with new ideas and innovative games.

Galyonkin insists it's still possible to analyse market trends based on the information available without costly third-party services, but it will, "be harder, and take way more time than before."

"SteamSpy removed the information asymmetry that people abused previously," he says. "In any market, if you have information asymmetry, it's bad for some of the parties that engage in any market transaction. Imagine buying a house without knowing the price of the house. Imagine signing a contract with a basketball player without knowing their performance in past games."

The loss of SteamSpy speaks to wider concerns in the industry - something we've addressed this morning. Digital data is becoming essential to making informed business decisions in order to ensure a company's survival and grow the industry. Yet Valve and even the biggest publishers remain determined to withhold this information - presumably out of fear that it gives their competitors an advantage, or would prevent them from appeasing shareholders.

"I guess it's a 'show me yours, I'll show you mine' kind of situation, only with tens of thousands of companies in the market," says Galyonkin on the likelihood that anything could replace SteamSpy. "That's really hard to co-ordinate.

"SteamSpy was acting like an independent agent that was easily verifiable. People trusted SteamSpy because you could always use the same algorithm and verify that the data was correct. That created a situation where I know some publishers were not exactly happy with SteamSpy, but it felt fair for everyone."

Independent publishers and developers have been remarkably open about how much they used SteamSpy - not as the sole basis for their strategies, but certainly as a significant factor. Given that this all started as a side project, did this add pressure to Galyonkin to ensure SteamSpy was accurate? Was he comfortable with how many business-breaking decisions might be based on his analysis?

"I did it precisely because I wanted people to be able to make informed decisions," he says. "I used to work as an industry analyst, now I'm a head of publishing strategy, and most of the decisions we make are based on data."

It's hard not to reiterate how little data there is in the market - not just on PC but on consoles, too. Yes, digital projects by NPD and ISFE are making some headway, but the industry still seems partly reliant on increasingly outdated retail charts. With the biggest blockbusters now selling between a third and half of all their copies digitally, it's impossible to gain an accurate understanding of the market by looking at the weekly or monthly Top 10.

"And boxed charts tend to skew towards single-player titles," Galyonkin adds. "Fortnite isn't even visible in the retail sales.

"The thing with consoles is, if you're a game developer and you're bigger than the smallest indie, the platform holders will actually share some information with you. They would make a prediction of sales you could expect, regional distribution or which languages you should pay attention to and localise for. At least in my experience, both Microsoft and Sony have been really helpful in providing information that can be used to make informed decisions. They don't provide as much as SteamSpy, but they do share information. Valve doesn't, unfortunately."

The privacy update that necessitated these changes - and, by extension, the death of SteamSpy - seems to be based on protecting users' sensitive information, although Galyonkin remains somewhat sceptical given how specific a move this has been.

"There are real concerns about people's personal data being exposed - we know this from all the Facebook stuff," he acknowledges. "So obviously if Valve is looking into that, it's absolutely the right decision.

"It's just in this particular case they chose to hide played games without hiding other information by default, which makes me wonder why they did that. If you want to comply with GDPR, you have to hide everything - not just games."

As mentioned, Galyonkin believes there is a way to continue analysing Steam data - but not to a sufficient standard for him to justify running SteamSpy. That doesn't mean he's finished with crunching Valve's numbers.

"Based on the information still available from Steam, I could actually write algorithms to use learnings based on previous data and on data that's still available to extrapolate marketing trends and look at data in games, smaller games," he says. "Obviously the problem is the bigger margin of error, so if I choose to do that - if I have time, of course, given that I still have Fortnite to run - I will probably not expose it to anyone. Because it will be way harder to use if you don't have any understanding of how statistics work."

 

[Black]

Once again or still?

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Jajaja, the sky is falling, the doomsday approaches, because Valve blocked your shit website. Get real, Sergey, will you?

My heart weeps for all the indie developers that might have to shut down shop because of this development, but the truth is, a little ethnic cleansing is exactly what PC market needs right now. It is overflowing with a tsunami of shit-tier shovelware, and to such an extent that it would take a full time job to even track all the new releases. This is exactly the kind of shit that caused the devastating crash in the 1980s.

There's far too many hacks out there thinking they are the next indie-milionaire-Jesus and I for one look forward to my pal Milton Friedman showing them the door.

 

[Black]

Jajaja, the sky is falling, the doomsday approaches, because Valve blocked your shit website. Get real, Sergey, will you?

My heart weeps for all the indie developers that might have to shut down shop because of this development, but the truth is, a little ethnic cleansing is exactly what PC market needs right now. It is overflowing with a tsunami of shit-tier shovelware, and to such an extent that it would take a full time job to even track all the new releases. This is exactly the kind of shit that caused the devastating crash in the 1980s.

First, a crash would be good.
Second, I don't see how this development stops AAA companies from releasing their own shovelware.

 

[Wilian]

Anyone thinking this is a bad change on a personal level kind of boggles my mind.

"Oh my god! Now I have to choose whetever I want my things to be out there on the public instead of it automatically being pushed on me and having to opt out!"

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Because this change just hides MonocledRpgMaster's 200 hours in Skyrim by default. If they introduced a "Hide your library/specific game/just your playtime?" box in the settings screen, we could have this choice without losing steamspy, or making it a pain to join friends in a game. This change was either half-assed or intentionally done this way to hide numbers from the peasants.

 

[kamen22]

Never liked steam, alot of cheap games on sale but i hate digital distribution

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

and the times of the real cheap games have finished since 2-3 years.

 

[mastroego]

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.

Just assume journos don't play games and are paid shills.
Just assume developers are SJWs in absense of a solid reason to think otherwise.
More or less all I need to know anyway.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.polygon.com/2018/4/12/17229752/steam-spy-charts-new-privacy-rules-valve

Steam Spy was a great hype buster for wary consumers
It shed light on an industry that talks about everything but the sales

Steam Spy is not technically shutting down, but an announcement on Tuesday was treated as such. Changes coming to Steam mean that users’ libraries will now be kept private and out of the data sluice that fed Steam Spy, a third-party site that tracked game ownership, concurrent users and other trends on Steam.

Sergey Galyonkin, who created Steam Spy in 2015, responded to the Steam update by saying that he can still make some extrapolations and other guesses about games’ performance and popularity, but that they will come with a huge margin of error — a major setback for what’s known as the most reliable third-party Steam stats site.

As with a museum close by that I always said I’d visit, but never did, I’m both disappointed and remorseful. The few times I used Steam Spy (or SteamCharts, which measures concurrent players), I always found the context I lacked from looking at the Steam ownership charts alone. Wait, why the hell is that blowing up ... oh, it was in the latest Humble Bundle.

Steam Spy was an effective hype buster, showing the ownership of a particular game on what is by far the dominant PC gaming marketplace. For many multiplatform AAA titles, its data cut through the dissembling we usually hear from publishers, who flack a big game with jargon like “sold-in” (copies shipped to retailers) or tell investors every quarter how many players it has, instead of how many units the company sold. In a marketplace where inboxes are filled with news releases that all sound the same, a small game trending in its launch week is a good reminder to take a closer look at it. (Minit and Pixark are great recent examples of that).

So I get why many of my colleagues who report on this data would lament that Steam Spy is getting lopped off at the knees by Steam’s new privacy rules. But I didn’t understand why so many players, readers and forum-goers — you know, those not, quote-unquote, in the industry — would be disappointed. Why should they really care if or how a game sells? Either they had fun with it or not. Isn’t this just vicarious, fanboy tribalism? I thought.

Thinking on it further, I’m wrong. It’s not.

GIVING CONSUMERS A FEELING OF CONTROL
In 10 years of covering this subject, I’ve seen how consumers view games companies as monolithic and near-unaccountable, and not without good reason. This is especially important when a publisher talks about “software as a service,” or as something it at least promises to maintain beyond stamping it on a disc and sending it to a distribution warehouse.

Steam Spy’s and SteamCharts’ information may not have any kind of corrective influence on a slipshod game or one with broken online features. But I can see how it gives a consumer some feeling of accountability or control in an otherwise one-way relationship, even if others might consider this data a placebo. Data trackers at least give Steam users an objective basis when they want to rip a publisher a new one: Hey, you hyped this thing all summer. Look at how many people own your game and are playing it. You sold them a broken product. So we can’t trust you anymore.

For all the excitement of a big game’s hype cycle, and the undeniable desire to hear more about what’s coming, it’s also felt a little uneasy and uncertain to me — a kind of lingering “oh, please be good” sentiment, even among those who were excited from the day the game was announced. Maybe it’s because the pain of disappointment (and the reminder of past disappointments) is a lot keener when the money at stake is five times the cost of a movie ticket. But video game hype is usually a lot more indulgent than the hype around movies, promising players they’ll get everything they’ve ever wanted to see, from favorite characters to new worlds.

If the game falls short of that promise, knowing how many people bought into the hype cycle is valuable intel for consumers. And when people are served something they plainly do not want — Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare took the sci-fi end of that franchise well past its expiration date — publicly available data means we can’t dismiss their complaints as the usual negativity from obsessive commenters and social media users.

The bottom line is, we have very little confirmation that we made a good choice when we bought — or didn’t buy — a video game. It’s mostly a hunch, informed by taste or perception. Reviews, however positive or negative, don’t provide the kind of consensus opinion that ownership (often taken as sales) and concurrent users do for a game’s acceptance and resonance. Look at LawBreakers, which was effectively mothballed last week. It didn’t stink in the reviews, but the reviews were just looking holistically at what LawBreakers was as a game. Placed in an environment with other games and their player bases, though, it hardly stood out. Those figures showed that people just weren’t going for it.

Video games are virtually alone among entertainment forms when it comes to how opaque their sales data is. The New York Times bestseller list, Billboard Hot 100 and weekly box office figures have been around for decades in mainstream print. Meanwhile, it took until 2016 for the NPD Group to finally start measuring sales of digital games. The public report only ranks the top 20 titles overall, and top 10 by platform — without giving numbers of units sold. Maybe this is because video games cost so much. Maybe it’s because third-party publishers don’t want to alienate one hardware maker by revealing how much better a game sold on a competitor’s platform.

In a business where everything is a hit or it’s dead meat, it could be easier to portray something as a hit if the actual sales totals are kept behind Oz’s curtain. Steam Spy, though it only covers games with a PC presence on Valve’s storefront, helped puncture that kind of must-buy mythology for the big names. It helped to highlight the worthiness and acceptance of smaller efforts. There’s nothing tribal or fanboyish about being interested in that. It just makes you a smart consumer, and a dedicated patron of the art of games.

 

[vonAchdorf]

https://www.polygon.com/2018/4/12/17229752/steam-spy-charts-new-privacy-rules-valve

The bottom line is, we have very little confirmation that we made a good choice when we bought — or didn’t buy — a video game. It’s mostly a hunch, informed by taste or perception. Reviews, however positive or negative, don’t provide the kind of consensus opinion that ownership (often taken as sales) and concurrent users do for a game’s acceptance and resonance. Look at LawBreakers, which was effectively mothballed last week. It didn’t stink in the reviews, but the reviews were just looking holistically at what LawBreakers was as a game. Placed in an environment with other games and their player bases, though, it hardly stood out. Those figures showed that people just weren’t going for it.

What's that bullshit? Once you bought a game, you know if it was a good choice or not, because it only matters if you like it, not how many others own it (unless it's multiplayer focussed, but even then you notice that it was a bad choice, if the servers are empty).

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.polygon.com/2018/4/12/17229752/steam-spy-charts-new-privacy-rules-valve

The bottom line is, we have very little confirmation that we made a good choice when we bought — or didn’t buy — a video game. It’s mostly a hunch, informed by taste or perception. Reviews, however positive or negative, don’t provide the kind of consensus opinion that ownership (often taken as sales) and concurrent users do for a game’s acceptance and resonance. Look at LawBreakers, which was effectively mothballed last week. It didn’t stink in the reviews, but the reviews were just looking holistically at what LawBreakers was as a game. Placed in an environment with other games and their player bases, though, it hardly stood out. Those figures showed that people just weren’t going for it.

What's that bullshit? Once you bought a game, you know if it was a good choice or not, because it only matters if you like it, not how many others own it (unless it's multiplayer focussed, but even then you notice that it was a bad choice, if the servers are empty).

You ever read a movie review after watching the movie to see what other people think? Same kind of thing I think.

 

[vonAchdorf]

You ever read a movie's review after watching the movie to see what other people think? Same kind of thing I think.

I read game reviews after buying a game, but not as a "confirmation"* for my decision. And he explicitly discounts reviews at not providing the same info / confirmation / feeling in the next sentence. I also don't think that you need ownership numbers to judge a game's resonance.

*While I think reviews work better as a "confirmation" than sales numbers on SteamSpy.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I do it out of curiosity, sometimes I like stuff that people hate and vice versa.

Polygon guy is probably referring to how sales numbers influence a decision more than reviews (which you may ignore and trust your personal taste, or buy it on a whim because you feel you might like it anyway), so having it clearly displayed for everyone to see is not in the industry's best interest (the big boys, at least).

 

[Mustawd]

tbh I think sales numbers have a bigger impact on getting funding or deciding if you're going to make a game or not. Especially if your proposed game is similar to another one that did or did not do well.

I don't really think it factors in to consumers' buying choices at all. Why would it?

I guess the only thing that would is if you see a high refund rate (which IIRC steamspy captured if the initial sales number was very high but then you saw a large dip).

 

[fantadomat]

Also it did show that sjw doesn't sell unless it is ubishit game. I will miss steamspy,it was pretty good source of information. You could even predict some changes in the market and the industry,based on the sales.

 

[Burning Bridges]

I always thought it's madness that anyone can see what you were playing, how long and even if you are currently in game. My boss would not dig up stuff like that, but for many people this must be a real problem.

I personally know certain people having over 2,500 hours in some games. If you consider that this equivalent to 200 x 8 hour days, or 1 man year, you can bet that there are companies who store such information and label "gaming addict". That means if someone has access to such database they may cancel you from elegibiliy for credit, work or appartments.

Apart from the fact that this can be used by criminals too. For example when you are in some game they know exactly where you are.

In that respect I'm not surprised Steam has changed this but that no one sued the shit out of them long ago.

 

[Infinitron]

I do it out of curiosity, sometimes I like stuff that people hate and vice versa.

Polygon guy is probably referring to how sales numbers influence a decision more than reviews (which you may ignore and trust your personal taste, or buy it on a whim because you feel you might like it anyway), so having it clearly displayed for everyone to see is not in the industry's best interest (the big boys, at least).

Some games require a significant time investment to truly understand. So you might play a game for a bit and think it's meh, but maybe it gets better later. Is it bullshit shovelware or just something you don't get yet? If the game is a commercial hit, that tells you maybe there's something you're not seeing. Important in the age of refunds.

But yeah it's kind of funny that the Polygon guy is implicitly conceding that reviews written by "professionals" like him aren't fulfilling this role.

 

[Mustawd]

If the game is a commercial hit, that tells you maybe there's something you're not seeing. Important in the age of refunds.

Sure, but do sales number tell you anything that steam reviews don't? If I see a game with more than 1,000 reviews and it's still highly rated, that gives me more information than sales. Take for example Banner Saga 1. The sales are quite good, but the reviews themselves have more information. Especially the negative ones.

Again, I don't see this as a loss to the consumer, but more a loss to the indie developer.

 

[Excommunicator]

I personally know certain people having over 2,500 hours in some games. If you consider that this equivalent to 200 x 8 hour days, or 1 man year, you can bet that there are companies who store such information and label "gaming addict".

And they'd be right.

 

[Roguey]

I personally know certain people having over 2,500 hours in some games. If you consider that this equivalent to 200 x 8 hour days, or 1 man year, you can bet that there are companies who store such information and label "gaming addict". That means if someone has access to such database they may cancel you from elegibiliy for credit, work or appartments.

Apart from the fact that this can be used by criminals too. For example when you are in some game they know exactly where you are.

How would they even know? Steam profiles are pseudonymous unless you intentionally put your real name on there.

In that respect I'm not surprised Steam has changed this but that no one sued the shit out of them long ago.

The option to make your profile private has always been there.

 

[fantadomat]

I always thought it's madness that anyone can see what you were playing, how long and even if you are currently in game. My boss would not dig up stuff like that, but for many people this must be a real problem.

I personally know certain people having over 2,500 hours in some games. If you consider that this equivalent to 200 x 8 hour days, or 1 man year, you can bet that there are companies who store such information and label "gaming addict". That means if someone has access to such database they may cancel you from elegibiliy for credit, work or appartments.

Apart from the fact that this can be used by criminals too. For example when you are in some game they know exactly where you are.

In that respect I'm not surprised Steam has changed this but that no one sued the shit out of them long ago.

There should be a punishment for playing Oblivion 2500 hours.