Steam Spy has been one of the most valuable tools created back in 2005 for Steam data. Created by Sergey Galyonkin, will no longer be able to operate because of steams new privacy. It was quite a shock of suddenly losing Steam Spy.
A change was made in this week’s Steam update which changed the privacy settings of steam which cut off a primary stream of data which caused SteamSpy to be dead.
It was revealed by GamesIndustry who talked to Galyonkin who said
I was surprised that Valve allowed it to operate for almost three years. I knew at some point they would shut it down,
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.
Steam Spy was used by developers and big journalists to use it in detail to track the number of interest people are taking in a game, player demographics, and reviews, leaving them in the dark for making it impossible for indie developers and publishers.
Galyankin says:
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,
“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 absolutely clear the vanishing of SteamSpy especially affects the smaller and less rich companies. Galyankin says it is still possible to get analytics of the market trends based on the information available but it will be ”harder, and take way more time than before.
You can read the full conversation here on the games industry.
