SteamSpy shutting down due to new privacy settings on Steam
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I really dont want my super conservative co-workers to know that I own games like Dream Daddy, Hunie Pop or some kusoge Compile Heart game that I got on a sale.
Good for you, not the case for a lot of people tho.
A kii at you not giving value to your game info which can be used as efficiently as your Likes/Retweets/Follows/etc...
I personally find it strange that they didn't inform Sergey before making it public. Valve always informed big "players" before making changes that could affect them. Hell they even informed us users before making bigger changes.
Exactly, If people want to know what games I play, I can tell them myself. I should be worried that I have playtime in some other games, which builds a unrealistic view of me (Or even worse, causes Issues based on said games).
I set my steam Profile public because I have Info there that I commonly link to randoms, But I always didn't like that stuff like my playtime & Games showed up for them.
I blame all those SteamSpy threads on here.
Multiplayer games don't even tell you how many players are online anymore either.
Multiplayer games don't even tell you how many players are online anymore either.
Yeah, that's why I also thought it was very odd. Very interested in seeing any response from Valve on the topic
I don't even game on PC and was let down by this news. Major bummer. Loved seeing the sales data.
Privacy settings are nice. To the SteamSpy thing:
As a developer, I can tell you firsthand that SteamSpy is a large source of anxiety and stress - it was never perfectly accurate, yet despite this it provided an not only an upsettingly easy way for devs to psychologically hurt themselves (we already know what our personal sales are, but being able to trivially compare ourselves and our success or lack thereof to other games or even our good friends - great for anxiety, which let me tell you runs rampant in this industry) but also for publishers to quickly look at (and potentially reject) small projects that might have promise but don't get approved because the dev hasn't delivered hits in the past. I suppose one might say "just don't go to the site then if it upsets you" but my friend that is not how humans work, and also sets aside the weird publisher interactions.
Anyway I'm sorry to those who liked SteamSpy - but I think on the whole the gains outweigh the losses. Or maybe I'm just bitter because SteamSpy kinda compromised a part of our dev cycle which could have been better if it weren't for their data tracking.
As a developer, I can tell you firsthand that SteamSpy is a large source of anxiety and stress - it was never perfectly accurate, yet despite this it provided an not only an upsettingly easy way for devs to psychologically hurt themselves (we already know what our personal sales are, but being able to trivially compare ourselves and our success or lack thereof to other games or even our good friends - great for anxiety, which let me tell you runs rampant in this industry) but also for publishers to quickly look at (and potentially reject) small projects that might have promise but don't get approved because the dev hasn't delivered hits in the past. I suppose one might say "just don't go to the site then if it upsets you" but my friend that is not how humans work, and also sets aside the weird publisher interactions.
Anyway I'm sorry to those who liked SteamSpy - but I think on the whole the gains outweigh the losses. Or maybe I'm just bitter because SteamSpy kinda compromised a part of our dev cycle which could have been better if it weren't for their data tracking.
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Do we know they didn't inform him?
While the privacy settings update was certainly in the works for a while, it's possible they decided at the eleventh hour to have privacy on by default.
This is a real shame IMO. Better privacy options are always welcome but it was a nice window into game sales on Steam.
The first is nowhere as easy as you make it sound. There is no easy way to show data in a format that is both human readable and machine unparseable.
The second would have given them bad publicity and Steam avoids that like the plague.
So no, this is actually the easiest, safest way for them to do this. Especially if we assume they really have no horse in the race and wpuld be doing it to appease AAA pubs.
Just to clarify, I'm not saying they did this to kill SteamSpy (in fact they probably didn't). I'm saying that if they did want to kill SteamSpy, this would be the optimal way.
Not quite the same thing but you can always go into "appear offline" mode:
Dingdingding
Non-compliance can incur up to 4% annual revenue fine.
I don't think that he would lie and act surprised on Twitter when it went live. He would probably have blog post ready for publishing or something if he was informed.
set mine to public because everyone needs to know I have played way too much ETS2MP
two birds with one stone
Why this doesn't make sense is that mere days ago they were holding talks with Devs at GDC and continued to praise and recommend SteamSpy, as they have been for a long time. The timeframe for such a U-turn in opinion seems unlikely and any pressured move to do this is also unlikely considering all the years they have been supportive of the service. Such a move could have been done long ago
Did I make it sound easy? Not my intention. No, but easier than making an entire user-facing feature. Yes, screwing with one guy's custom made scripts is probably easier than shipping a new feature.
Remind me what thread we're in, again? Oh yes, right, the one where everyone is assuming Valve fucked over the SteamSpy developer on purpose with no evidence. Bad publicity follows them wherever they go.
Do we assume this? Have we heard anyone at Steam actually complain about the website? Has there been any notable issues from AAA pubs about SteamSpy?
Taking the proposition that Valve is doing this with the explicit or even secondary motive to eliminate SteamSpy (and other related Steam metadata websites) takes a lot more than what I'm hearing so far. Not to mention that these privacy settings are indeed a very good thing that people should be cheering Valve for, despite the casualties.
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Fair enough on the intent bit.
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That is seriously unfortunate. Not only was it incredibly helpful, but I got a lot of enjoyment out of learning what games the PC market likes and dislikes. I was fascinated to find out that basically no 3D platformer has ever done especially well on Steam, which made the Spyro remakes not coming to Steam make sense to me, whereas before I was just annoyed.
Deep Space Waifu is fun as hell. Bought it just for the memes and ended up actually enjoying it.
If you're already into bullet hell games, I doubt it'll do anything for you at all, but if you're like me and always wanted to get the genre but it never clicked for you, maybe the more casual approach of this game can help.
I'm definitely looking forward to trying more games like that.
Well just look at something like Undertale or Stardew Valley. Games made by just one person that sold millions of copies on Steam. Having that type of data be public has literally influenced thousands of developers to make indie games on PC/Steam in recent years. Seeing price data and seeing how customers respond is important to creators. The success of Japanese games on Steam has influenced other Japanese developers to release games on Steam as well. Its a snowball affect when sales data is public. Very few companies actually share data with the public these days. There was a thread not that long ago here in regards to some game where a Japanese developer said that they were releasing games on Steam because they've seen other devs have success. I believe it was NnKII but it may have been something else. All the data benefits gamers and creators in the long run. Steamspy was one of few tools out there that did something for digital data too.
I mean, Steamspy was great and all, but the data they were collecting was not anonymized so I can't say that Valve is making the incorrect move here. Furthermore, even if the default was to have libraries be visible, the increased number of people hiding their libraries would have made Steamspy even more inaccurate than it already is anyway.
The EU law changes are far far more important than the Facebook bad press
You have no idea how much I want those changes to be adopted outside of the EU. Y'all EU posters are lucky.
Big corporations that can invest in paying for sales analytics to external companies win with this situation, while indie developers are fucked up.
Steamspy was a great source for planning future developments, and analyzing the data for trying to do more compelling games appealing to a more broader segment of the market.
A very sad day for the indie industry.
Steamspy was a great source for planning future developments, and analyzing the data for trying to do more compelling games appealing to a more broader segment of the market.
A very sad day for the indie industry.
With most sites and sevices they will be seeing as it' easier to apply them to everyone than single out EU users
No it wouldn't, just adding an oauth requirement for each lookup, and add a basic time between each request would be trivial to implement and completely cripple any future data harvesting while being basically invisible to legitimate users.
How would these theoretical sales analytics firms get data that Steamspy can't now?
Steam did something good? Well colour me surprised. The inaccuracies in first week sales was not good.
Nah, concurrent player numbers are from Valve's own site, and are just basic numbers:
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
Everything there is Valve's data, and shouldn't be affected by GDPR, since there's no personal information, and no third-party company interaction.
Through firms specialized in marketing and current tendencies. Companies that can invest a lot of money doing surveys, with people specialized in the use of branding and how every single decision taken in a game, starting from the logo, can appeal to a different segment of the public.
I've been working on it a little bit. Pretty crazy. Has some good and some bad. Not familiar enough with it beyond the work I've done to make a judgment call.
It does have some weird effects though. Microsoft updated the community favorites page on Halo 3 for the first time in 8 years or so to remove some user data.
According to the comments on the Twitter page, the site will remain as an archive.