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

Roguey

Codex Staff
Staff Member
Sawyerite
Joined
May 29, 2010
Messages
35,653

Valve just made a change to their privacy settings, making games owned by Steam users hidden by default.

Steam Spy relied on this information being visible by default and won't be able to operate anymore.

Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee how will I stalk now. :(
 

DemonKing

Arcane
Joined
Dec 5, 2003
Messages
5,958
"sigh" Back to the old days of endless speculation over sales.

Well it's not too hard - if a company goes bust after releasing a title it probably didn't fare well. If they release press releases touting numbers and port it to different formats after the initial release they're probably doing ok.

Kind of understandable given the current Facebook fiasco that privacy is being beefed up.
 

Archibald

Arcane
Joined
Aug 26, 2010
Messages
7,869
Well it's not too hard - if a company goes bust after releasing a title it probably didn't fare well. If they release press releases touting numbers and port it to different formats after the initial release they're probably doing ok.

Yeah well, in that case people could probably rationalize that new Torment sold well considering that they are still developing new shit.
 

flyingjohn

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2012
Messages
2,945
This is going to hurt Valve badly.Any game game that isn't aaa or a solo indie will have a hard time getting funding. Remember investors require you to present some data on market viability of your genre,and steam spy allowed that.(it was flawed but still a option)
 

Kyl Von Kull

The Night Tripper
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Jamrock District
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
again and again, customers treated as enemies. it's when these things happen that i'm thankful i'm broke and cheap, so i won't give my money to those motherfuckers.

Customers treated as enemies? Valve did this to prevent any kind of Facebook style backlash from customers about what they do with your data. Congress apparently wants to regulate digital privacy and Valve understandably wants no part of that.

The real culprit here is Mark Zuckerberg. If he’d been able to pass the Turing Test in his Senate testimony, Valve might not have felt the need to do this. Alas, he will never pass the Turing Test until he replaces his organic components.

That Facebook hearing was like watching a robot try to teach a bunch of geriatric monkeys how to use a computer, with a few notable exceptions like Lindsey Graham of all people and Kemala Harris.
 
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Hoaxmetal

Arcane
Joined
Jul 19, 2009
Messages
9,157
Alas, he will never pass the Turing Test until he replaces his organic components.
Mk3FFhw.gif
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
https://steamed.kotaku.com/latest-steam-update-is-bad-news-for-steam-spy-1825163900

He added in an email to Kotaku that while it might be tempting to believe this was a targeted strike on Valve’s part (this is data they’d probably prefer to keep private, after all), he thinks Steam Spy’s unceremonious fate is more of a byproduct. “I’m not sure this was done to remove Steam Spy, seeing as they’ve also limited people’s ability to join their friends in their games,” he said. “This has far too many implications for Steam.” More privacy by default is, of course, a good thing, but it’s come at the cost of a service that thrived in Steam’s margins.

Responding to Twitter questions about Steam Spy’s future, Galyonkin further explained that opt-in data gathering won’t work for the types of estimates his site was doing, and he doubts he’ll be able to strike a deal with Valve to regain the level of data access he had before. He added that, if nothing else, he’ll keep an archive up, and he’s considering other estimation methods. They wouldn’t be as precise, but they’d be something.

Still, he’s not particularly optimistic at the moment.

“I don’t think there are any options unless Valve reverts this particular part of the update,” he told me.
 

Heretic

Cipher
Joined
Dec 1, 2015
Messages
844
Ballpark estimates based on the concurrent users, review count and people who made their profile public would be enough for me.

I'm not interested in numbers like "17,354 vs 3,158,897". 20 thousand vs 3 million would be enough information for me.
 
Joined
Mar 3, 2010
Messages
8,818
Location
Italy
i don't get all the fuss about facebook lately. we knew since the beginning it worked like that, why are people surprised now? i'm not the one who coined "if the product is free, then you're the product".
 

Kyl Von Kull

The Night Tripper
Patron
Joined
Jun 15, 2017
Messages
3,152
Location
Jamrock District
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Huh, I stand corrected. I’m not sure I totally buy his logic, though. If hiding all your games is the new default, why hide anything else? On some level it’s a platform for connecting with your friends and playing games with them; hiding user names would be kind of counterproductive. As long as no one can tell I own Dream Daddy, I’m a happy camper.

...oops

On the other hand, maybe they want to sell their hard sales data to publishers and the existence of SteamSpy was ruining a potential revenue stream.
 

lukaszek

the determinator
Patron
Joined
Jan 15, 2015
Messages
12,618
deterministic system > RNG
 
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