Valve's - Steam Spy Replacement

Valve might soon be releasing their own version of Steam Spy.

Link - https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/29/…nt-game-stats/

It looks as though Valve has something up its sleeve to replace Steam Spy. According to PC Games N, Jan-Peter Ewert, the head of business development at Valve, was asked about Steam Spy at a game industry conference. Ewert responded that developers needed "something better than Steam Spy," and that Valve was working on it.

“Our general approach has always been to provide open APIs so that when we don’t offer the amount of tools that we should, the community can step in. We are very much working on new tools and new ways of getting data out of Steam, and we hope that data can be more accurate and more useful than what Steam Spy previously offered you.”

What is Steam Spy ?

Edit : It's in the article …

I find it amusing that people might actually care what others are playing. Honestly, it sounds more like a hoax of some sort, who honestly would care that much? If some pinhead wants to observe me playing Shining Force or some other delight of mine, just que up, mate.

Well sales figures are nice for curiosity… Anyway people want it so thank value for doing it (unless they turn it into a paid product then curse them )

Originally Posted by Carnifex
I find it amusing that people might actually care what others are playing. Honestly, it sounds more like a hoax of some sort, who honestly would care that much? If some pinhead wants to observe me playing Shining Force or some other delight of mine, just que up, mate.

Good points but SteamSpy was mostly used to see how many copies a game sold. It was also the only public source to find such information unless publishers released the data.

Yep, though it also wasn't always terribly accurate. Free weekends would really mess with the numbers bad, for instance.

Steam Spy just fostered bad journalism, if you ask me. Instead of getting in contact with developers and asking them how many copies they sold, so called journalists relied on data collected by some guy from Russia. And how many copies some game sold is a meaningless statistic to end users. Besides satisfying a curiosity, that is.

Originally Posted by Ivanwah
Steam Spy just fostered bad journalism, if you ask me. Instead of getting in contact with developers and asking them how many copies they sold, so called journalists relied on data collected by some guy from Russia. And how many copies some game sold is a meaningless statistic to end users. Besides satisfying a curiosity, that is.

You are wrong. Just read articles about how a lof of publishers funded games that were hesitant before because of the data shown by steam spy.

steam spy is a tool terribly useful to developers and marketing.

Originally Posted by Carnifex
I find it amusing that people might actually care what others are playing.

I rather believe it's not "people" but rather "business people".

Originally Posted by CRD
You are wrong. Just read articles about how a lof of publishers funded games that were hesitant before because of the data shown by steam spy.

steam spy is a tool terribly useful to developers and marketing.

Yes, but Valve originally refused to publish adventure games BECAUSE of what their data was showing. Remember how hard it was for Daedalic to get a foot into steam ? They actually needed the help of another publisher to do so !

Originally Posted by CRD
You are wrong. Just read articles about how a lof of publishers funded games that were hesitant before because of the data shown by steam spy.

steam spy is a tool terribly useful to developers and marketing.

That sounds even more terrible. It shows that publishers are only looking at numbers and what sells and not games themselves. They tend to play it safe and that's how we get lootbox grindfest no. 23241.

The numbers can be important for players, too, if the players want to get involved in multiplayer aspects. Even if a game is great, it won't matter to them if there's nobody to play it with.

It can be handy in our sorts of discussions, too. NieR:Automata just got a DLC and no updates for its many issues. Meanwhile, Square keeps updating Chrono Trigger. Why?? Well, maybe CT actually sold a whole lot more than I would have guessed… but I can't tell because there's no Steam Spy.

Originally Posted by Ivanwah
That sounds even more terrible. It shows that publishers are only looking at numbers and what sells and not games themselves.

Uhhh, you do know that publishers are mostly in it for the money, right? They've all got .COM instead of .ORG at the end of their web addresses for a reason.

Originally Posted by Zloth
Uhhh, you do know that publishers are mostly in it for the money, right? They've all got .COM instead of .ORG at the end of their web addresses for a reason.

Obviously I know that. Doesn't mean I have to like it.