It is theft of sales data. I never gave him permission to steal my data, neither did most game developers.
That and frankly he was such an asshole about throwing away his original commitment to honour peoples requests to have their data removed, particularly to the Kerbal guys who genuinely feared for their families if the cartels in Mexico learned how much money they had.
If I had to guess, I’d say it was a result of the upcoming GDPR (new data protection laws) coming up in EU on the 25th of may that is the result of this. Data is to be protected, or huge fines can be levied. I welcome this kind of change!
As a consumer, boo.
I have been wondering when steam would combat web scraping. Took them long enough. (EDIT: As they had been grousing about it for quite a while)
would not having the multiplayer numbers be anti-consumer ? like having someone accidentally buy the Win10 Store version of COD or any version of Lawbreakers?
Just like Nielson steals viewership data of TV shows through their surveys right?
Nevertheless, reasonable move on Steam’s part. A loss, but probably overall (privacy, etc) [economic] utility gain? Especially as most users probably never consider their privacy settings. Nudging and all that.
That’s not the same. Nielsen’s surveys are voluntary; SteamSpy collected data without user consent.
But neither is it stealing. A lot of research can and is done based on sampling, and this was just that.
Sucks for Sergey. I guess the gravy train was going to end someday. I know some devs absolutely hated his site.
Uhh… that data wasn’t from the game developers. It was from the consumers.
There were also indie game devs that discovered were being screwed by some publishers about how much their game was selling. And lots of indie game devs liked Steamspy as market research tool.
He didn’t steal anything; and stopping the removals of games from steamspy was not about being an asshole, but about not defeating the entire purpose of the site.
How dare developers want to know if publishers/company owners are fucking them over, really.
Apparently there was one developer from Valve at GDC who was praising Steamspy as a great tool for developers in his talk? Left arm not knowing what the right arm is doing.
Respectfully, that is incorrect. His openly stated goal for Steamspy was and is to make money for himself. On the backs of other peoples data and hard work.
Say you found him useful, fine. But dont try and paint him as a friend of developers, he is not.
And I say that from first hand experience.
I don’t see why he shouldn’t be able to make some money from his work (coding the site and running the servers is not free either). The service was mostly free and only some advanced features were paywalled for those who wanted them.
He is friend of those developers (and customers) who wanted the level playing field of everyone being able to see the data steamspy provided. You weren’t one of them. Alright.
Guys, in regards to developers being screwed: I have not seen a contract were the developer does not have access on request to his/her games sales reports from individual platforms. It’s not that hard even to negotiate for the access to be instantaneous through a developer account with permissions on the platform.
If we are not talking about the studio but about the individual employees… That’s a different matter, but there a tool like Steamspy, which does only show gross sales and not even a price average, is so blunt as to be near to useless. Gross to net to profit conversion can vary wildly depending on a specific studio circumstance, and gross sales are not necessarily a measure of an studio’s income.
As an aside, I have used Steamspy data for market analysis, and I found it an useful tool and not detrimental to us, but I can see and respect the other point of view. Sale data being public has changed how a lot of financing works.
He won money in exchange of HIS hard work. Who got the idea and implemented the scrape system? Who paid the servers needed for it? Who created the website with super complete stats and advanced filters?
I am gonna miss it, I liked to see the statistics.
My feelings as well. I don’t have a stake in the conflict between Sergey and developers/publishers. Just speaking as a consumer that liked to see how things shook out saleswise, Steamspy was cool.
How exactly is it theft of data if it is made freely available? Am I stealing your words by quoting you?
Steamspy going away is a major loss for consumers and a notable gain for developers/publishers.
For instance, I probably would have purchased Lawbreakers if I didn’t have access to the concurrent player numbers and how rough they were. If I don’t have access to player numbers I am going to be highly skeptical of multiplayer only games until I am sure they have a solid base.