Which is irrelevant because concurrent player numbers are still public. It’s game ownership that it’s not by default. It’s about protecting consumer data by not making it public by default. Steamspy’s demise is not the objective, but a collateral damage.
Edit: btw, a Steam spy- like system can still exist if you extrapolate current known ownership vs known previous concurrent players vs. current concurrent players and you adjust for genre/multiplayer. Data would eventually deviate but for a good while it would be a good approximation.
Exactly - It compares to facebook scrabing - The data is all there, but it really doesn’t belong to anyone except each individual. Steam has a lot of costumers in EU, and has to abide by the upcoming GDPR rules concerning personal data - I’m pretty sure this is one of those ways it has chosen to do so.
Except I just read in an interview with the creator of Steam Spy that if that was what their goal was they would have also auto-hidden all profile data - but they don’t, it seems to be only libraries?
That’s what I read, it may be outdated info by now, your post was only 9 minutes ago. :)
Well, I’m obviously not privy to what steam thinks or does, but the thing to remember is, that there are several ways in which you ARE allowed to use, harvest, display otherwise protected data - one of those are, if your company has a legitimate business reason that supersedes those of the individual, you may keep on doing what you do. Like most new larger laws, the exact scope of this kind of thing is usually arbitrated over the course of a few years in courtrooms. This may be one of those areas where Steam has decided to do one thing with part of their data, but reasons that they have compelling enough reasons to leave the rest open.
But - its just conjecture of course. I AM a big fan of protecting peoples data though, even to the detriment of where I work or to my hobbies, like this.
As a mere consumer these days, I’m happy less of my data is able to be mined. If I was a journalist, however, that would make my job more difficult assuming I ever wanted to talk about sales or not wanting to wait for annual reports on development studios and publishers.
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.
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.
That information you have to explicitly give Steam (and it will not be compliant with the law anyway, most likely, but you would have had to explicitly agree to share it with Valve at least -I’m not sure what you exactly agree to-).
“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.”
Given the thread about median sales in steam being less than livable wage, I doubt the absence of that data will make more devs quit. If anything, my fear is more people will get misconceptions of the market and jump in.
Steamcharts is about as worthless as they come when providing numbers that are actionable. You get a number for a hour/day, is “1” of those the same “1” from an hour from now? Or is it different? It’s data without context. Oh, you can spot a trending game, but trying to do market research is worthless.
Steamdb is also saying the same thing as SteamSpy btw, which I rely more on Steamdb.
My only answer is we can all moan, but steam represents about 1/4 of the actual total paying gaming crowd. Hell, LOL has as many active players as Steam has, and it’s one game. With no transparency from the major publishers (Tencent/EA/Blizzard/Microsoft/Ubisoft/etc) on their numbers, Steam is just joining the crowd rather than trying to set themselves apart.
Not at all. Steamspy worked by statistical analysis and the same can be done here. Number of concurrent players at specific milestones (one week, one month, on year…) will very likely correlate with total until sold. You need to store a historic registry of each game, though, to see and compare those milestones.
I wouldn’t fully subscribe to this notion. For many smaller dev teams and individuals, SteamSpy was a significant source to tap in for competition analysis and general market analysis, e.g. the effect of Steam sales, launch timing and whatnot. There are likely to be hundreds if not thousands of pitch decks out there which in some slide will refer to numbers pulled from SteamSpy. Many of the indie devs I know are not super-secretive about their own figures and never did mind SteamSpy revealing their sales - and they won’t be able to get any comparable market data since subscriptions to NPD, GfK and the like are too expensive for smaller studios.
This 110%. It gave you a view into the temperature for genres and markets.
The reason why this event hurts indies is because it now makes these observations less concrete, more anecdotal, and therefore increasing risk if you want to try something.
and how do you propose to get a baseline? Every game will correlate the same way?
Some data scientist may be able to glom something, but everyday people who want to try to ascertain numbers will be hard pressed.
For example, you’d need to scrape & store all the data - for every day since the game went on sale. Who is going to do that???
I’m not going to do it. And I think SteamSpy is telling that while they were happy scraping the data, they are not interested in trying to correlate it to a number you can believe in.
