Steam Spy announces it’s shutting down, blames Valve’s new privacy settings

Sales-estimate service, borne from an Ars data project, says goodbye to its best source.

Read the whole story

 

[MDCCCLV]

That's too bad. Your articles were always very interesting.

 

[shoelace_1]

the obvious question is why does steam produce a report like this own its own..

but the answer is probably something like "its not in their best interest"

 

[0bliv!on]

the obvious question is why does steam produce a report like this own its own..

but the answer is probably something like "its not in their best interest"

Because it'd cost money and would make Steam no money.

If Steam charged for it, it'd present complicated conflict of interest issues since they'd be selling information on sales, to the very companies selling on their platform, and whose sales would be affected by Steam actions like sales, discounts, etc.

 

[GrimEcho]

I don't mind publicly sharing me game data, and I think many fellow gamers will agree. But if the default setting is to keep the data private, then there is little incentive for me to enable it.

I didn't even know the data was defaulted to public until I read this article. I think that shows that the issue is not so much with sharing the data, but with users not being informed.

Instead of changing the public sharing to opt-in, why not keep it opt-out, but notify all users the next time they login to steam and ask them to confirm.

 

[shoelace_1]

the obvious question is why does steam produce a report like this own its own..

but the answer is probably something like "its not in their best interest"

Because it'd cost money and would make Steam no money.

If Steam charged for it, it'd present complicated conflict of interest issues since they'd be selling information on sales, to the very companies selling on their platform, and whose sales would be affected by Steam actions like sales, discounts, etc.

would not the aspect of "look how many users we have. look how much time and money they spend" not be worth some effort?

 

[Belzebuth]

the obvious question is why does steam produce a report like this own its own..

but the answer is probably something like "its not in their best interest"

Because it'd cost money and would make Steam no money.

If Steam charged for it, it'd present complicated conflict of interest issues since they'd be selling information on sales, to the very companies selling on their platform, and whose sales would be affected by Steam actions like sales, discounts, etc.

They’re already publishing hardware stats which makes them no money either, but is interesting for all of us to see.

 

[grommit!]

it will also specifically let players hide ... gameplay time counts

Heh, I can believe this being a user request from those who've spent many hours playing games featuring "realistically" proportioned anime characters

Spoiler

[edit - image may be considered NSFW]

 

[LuDux]

I'd be fine with it if it was opt-in.

 

[Dachannien]

Finally, I can play all my hentai games shame-free!

 

[malor]

I've had my profile set as private as I could for a long time, on the simple principle that leaking as little data as possible is always to my benefit.

But, at the same time, I've liked the ability to see whether friends seem to have enjoyed gifts I've sent them; it's pretty cool seeing 200 hours on something you sent, and 1 hour is a pretty good sign that it didn't catch their interest, so sending more like that would probably not be a good idea.

I don't think of that as misuse, but IS definitely being snoopy. They might not agree, and by making the profile leakage explicitly opt-in, then I'll be quite certain that they don't mind me "looking over their shoulder", as it were. So I regret the probable loss of a tool I found useful, but also appreciate that if and when I can use it, going forward, I don't need to feel even a little bit guilty.

 

[Lily Liliaceae]

It's a shame. This tool was great to see the overall health of a specific game's multi-player community and avoid buying games where the main allure is the idea of playing with others but no one is playing anymore.

Maybe that's one of the reasons why they prefer this information to be hidden.

 

[0bliv!on]

I don't mind publicly sharing me game data, and I think many fellow gamers will agree. But if the default setting is to keep the data private, then there is little incentive for me to enable it.

I didn't even know the data was defaulted to public until I read this article. I think that shows that the issue is not so much with sharing the data, but with users not being informed.

Instead of changing the public sharing to opt-in, why not keep it opt-out, but notify all users the next time they login to steam and ask them to confirm.

I'm fairly sure you knew if you used Steam on anything like a regular basis - if that information wasn't shared, people on your friends list wouldn't know you were playing a certain game at any given time.

 

[mangodrink]

The data should have been default private to begin with, but while it lasted at least steam spy was able to do some work with it (was it for profit?). I wonder if howlongtobeat would also be affected, I may not have knowingly used steam spy data but I did use howlongtobeat to help gauge value.

On the hopeful side maybe steam seasonal sales won't try to push profile-related trinkets and badges to drive sales. And maybe valve will publish similar data but anonymized from within steam.

 

[vlam]

Kind of hard to balance the privacy of gaming against the data of sales.

While I'm always for user privacy, the topic here is video games. It isn't like Valve is leaking patient health information or credit score related data. The privacy impact of this being freely available is generally pretty small and those who are wary of it likely went and found the settings to make their profile private. But at the same time, a company taking steps to protect their customer's privacy, seemingly for no benefit to themselves, cannot be ignored. That's excellent.

However, video game sales are remarkably opaque. Have you ever tried to find how many copies a game sold? How much revenue was generated by that game? Those statistics are fucking impossible. Steam data being able to shine a soft light on the PC side of game sales was valuable. Losing that data is saddening if only because it was really the only accessible data that was available. What are we left with? Having to dig into SEC filings and quarterly reports for publishers? That's rarely helpful.

 

[Boskone]

I'd like to request some granularity to as to enable services like SteamSpy to operate, but realistically most people will leave it at the default...and I like "off" as the default.

I guess the next best thing would be for Steam to look into producing similar reporting themselves.

 

[Nathan2055]

Some commentors on Steam have speculated that this wasn't the result of user feedback, it was the result of publisher feedback. No self-respecting wide-tie would want this level of granular sales information out in the open. So: make game libraries private by default, most people won't turn it on for whatever reason, and bam you've destroyed the ability to have that kind of info available while painting it as a pro-consumer move.

It's tin-foily, but it does make sense, especially considering that Valve hasn't bothered with other heavily requested privacy features, like the ability to hide your friends list or group memberships from your profile.

 

[jdale]

Kind of hard to balance the privacy of gaming against the data of sales.

While I'm always for user privacy, the topic here is video games. It isn't like Valve is leaking patient health information or credit score related data. The privacy impact of this being freely available is generally pretty small and those who are wary of it likely went and found the settings to make their profile private. But at the same time, a company taking steps to protect their customer's privacy, seemingly for no benefit to themselves, cannot be ignored. That's excellent.

However, video game sales are remarkably opaque. Have you ever tried to find how many copies a game sold? How much revenue was generated by that game? Those statistics are fucking impossible. Steam data being able to shine a soft light on the PC side of game sales was valuable. Losing that data is saddening if only because it was really the only accessible data that was available. What are we left with? Having to dig into SEC filings and quarterly reports for publishers? That's rarely helpful.

I can see a public interest in the aggregate data, but that in no way justifies making the personal stats public. It shouldn't be up to Steam to decide whether game playing data is or isn't private, it should be up to the user. Opt-out is making that choice for the majority of users; many of them will never even realize the data is being shared. If you really want a lot of people to opt-in, make the decision mandatory when the account is created with no default -- everyone must actively make a choice of public or private, no one can leave it on a default setting.

 

[0bliv!on]

the obvious question is why does steam produce a report like this own its own..

but the answer is probably something like "its not in their best interest"

Because it'd cost money and would make Steam no money.

If Steam charged for it, it'd present complicated conflict of interest issues since they'd be selling information on sales, to the very companies selling on their platform, and whose sales would be affected by Steam actions like sales, discounts, etc.

They’re already publishing hardware stats which makes them no money either, but is interesting for all of us to see.

Yes, but they don't sell that hardware on behalf of third-party vendors.

It may honestly not even be a considered decision, just something they haven't felt the need to do because it was already available. We *may* well see this kind stuff later when Steam realises there is interest in this information and no one else is providing it.

 

[Abhi Beckert]

light of Internet and social-media privacy landing at the top of major news outlets this week, another major online service announced its own privacy-policy updates on Tuesday

The GDPR deadline is 6 weeks away, which is a far more likely reason.

Under the GDPR it is illegal for data sharing to be an opt-out, which is the behaviour Steam Spy relied on. Data sharing must be opt in, and agreeing to a EULA does not count as "opting in".

 

[LodeRunner]

Valve pointed out that Steam will also receive a long, long, long-awaited "invisible" function for Steam's online-status toggle, which will allow players to actively communicate with Steam friends while hiding from the general public...

My memory could be playing tricks on me, but I could have sworn Steam used to have this and then it went away (the same way I could swear that at one point there used to be options governing the time required for it to auto-away and auto-snooze). I seem to remember having Online, Busy, Away, Invisible, and Offline. I might be confusing it with Origin, which does have an Invisible setting, but lacks an Offline setting.

 

[Tecnix]

Kind of related, but this will make all those free-game promotions, which want you to link your steam account to their database, all the more valuable to the publisher because they always request you turn on your profile visibility to public before sending you a free game copy.

 

[Sufinsil]

I've had my profile set as private as I could for a long time, on the simple principle that leaking as little data as possible is always to my benefit.

But, at the same time, I've liked the ability to see whether friends seem to have enjoyed gifts I've sent them; it's pretty cool seeing 200 hours on something you sent, and 1 hour is a pretty good sign that it didn't catch their interest, so sending more like that would probably not be a good idea.

I don't think of that as misuse, but IS definitely being snoopy. They might not agree, and by making the profile leakage explicitly opt-in, then I'll be quite certain that they don't mind me "looking over their shoulder", as it were. So I regret the probable loss of a tool I found useful, but also appreciate that if and when I can use it, going forward, I don't need to feel even a little bit guilty.

Its been awhile since I looked, but pretty sure Private means Friends can still see everything.

 

[yet_another_wumpus]

I don't mind publicly sharing me game data, and I think many fellow gamers will agree. But if the default setting is to keep the data private, then there is little incentive for me to enable it.

I didn't even know the data was defaulted to public until I read this article. I think that shows that the issue is not so much with sharing the data, but with users not being informed.

Instead of changing the public sharing to opt-in, why not keep it opt-out, but notify all users the next time they login to steam and ask them to confirm.

Judging from the research that lead to founding Cambridge Analytics, your complete Steam profile (especially including hours played) can very likely be combined to find a ton of surprisingly accurate data (and is harder to fake than a Facebook page). Just accept that the Steam Spy data probably isn't worth the cost and move on.

Of course, how you keep google and your ISP from knowing everything about even while you use Duckduckgo and a VPN is beyond me.

 

[vlam]

Kind of hard to balance the privacy of gaming against the data of sales.

While I'm always for user privacy, the topic here is video games. It isn't like Valve is leaking patient health information or credit score related data. The privacy impact of this being freely available is generally pretty small and those who are wary of it likely went and found the settings to make their profile private. But at the same time, a company taking steps to protect their customer's privacy, seemingly for no benefit to themselves, cannot be ignored. That's excellent.

However, video game sales are remarkably opaque. Have you ever tried to find how many copies a game sold? How much revenue was generated by that game? Those statistics are fucking impossible. Steam data being able to shine a soft light on the PC side of game sales was valuable. Losing that data is saddening if only because it was really the only accessible data that was available. What are we left with? Having to dig into SEC filings and quarterly reports for publishers? That's rarely helpful.

I can see a public interest in the aggregate data, but that in no way justifies making the personal stats public. It shouldn't be up to Steam to decide whether game playing data is or isn't private, it should be up to the user. Opt-out is making that choice for the majority of users; many of them will never even realize the data is being shared. If you really want a lot of people to opt-in, make the decision mandatory when the account is created with no default -- everyone must actively make a choice of public or private, no one can leave it on a default setting.

It was always up to the user, I'm not sure what you're going on about. You always had the ability to make your profile private; it's just that before this change you had to actually make that change. As I said, Valve doing something user friendly in the space of privacy should be commended. Yet I still recognize the extemely marginal impact of public game data to someone's privacy and the extremely beneficial aggregate data we're now losing.

 

[MDCCCLV]

I've had my profile set as private as I could for a long time, on the simple principle that leaking as little data as possible is always to my benefit.

But, at the same time, I've liked the ability to see whether friends seem to have enjoyed gifts I've sent them; it's pretty cool seeing 200 hours on something you sent, and 1 hour is a pretty good sign that it didn't catch their interest, so sending more like that would probably not be a good idea.

I don't think of that as misuse, but IS definitely being snoopy. They might not agree, and by making the profile leakage explicitly opt-in, then I'll be quite certain that they don't mind me "looking over their shoulder", as it were. So I regret the probable loss of a tool I found useful, but also appreciate that if and when I can use it, going forward, I don't need to feel even a little bit guilty.

You can actually snoop on them in real time. By seeing when they're in game and when they last played and what games they're playing you can tell when they're home and if they're skipping school or work.

 

[SplatMan_DK]

Has he even asked Valve if they would deliver the data in anonymized form?

I think the new focus on privacy is great. But there is no reason this should destroy a source of aggregated data. Steam could easily deliver this if they wanted, with a minimum of effort.

Sometimes all you have to do is ask.

 

[dramamoose]

I'd like to see Steam just publicize price histories and sales by day. Doesn't have to include user data, we're looking at the games data. Of course, there's no way they will; this is valuable sales data to publishers.

Wonder if there should be an industry-wide effort to do it in the same way box office sales or album sales are reported.

 

[Balderstrom]

Steam Spy = goodbye....

A platform like Steam should address it's customers (in this case, buyers of its products) over the data sold to third parties. How many Steam users will suddenly lose anything if SteamSpy is gone? ZERO.... About time platforms start taking responsibility for their data.

Why does everyone think that a successful private platform should have to give away its data? If you want data from another company, pay for it (if it is for sale (as whole other topic)), or dream you had such a nice platform to get your data from. Don't complain when your business model of using someone else data is no longer a reality when they stop giving you the info for free.

The advertising of the internet in the short term is its ruin. Lets go back to stop making money off the internet from advertising and continue to sue it to spread information and QoL a reality.

I found the approximate "#-of-owners of a game" in "Enhanced Steam" a useful metric when making a decision to buy a game or not.

End result of this change, will be I'll just buy less games.

 

[Darkness1231]

Somewhat mixed personally, ever since Kyle did the first piece. SteamSpy did however fill a need, at least it seemed like it to me.

However, the other side is I own a couple hundred Steam games. There are quite a bit less on GOG, and *cough-choke* Origin. But Steam came after I came late to the PS3 party (because of OtherOS) and then to Xbox 360. I didn't go to the new consoles, primarily because of Steam.

The reason doesn't show in a database. Well, it might after this. My first Steam purchases were in support of devs supporting Linux and OS X. Some worked, some didn't. Linux is my favorite system but I never really got into gaming on it. Too many projects of my own to do.

200+ games, most played game: Fallout 4, 2000+h, 32days on one character. A significant percentage that I bought but never played. Sales are impulse buys. My personal budget is rather limited these days. No database has covered the fact that I buy to support the team. Big team, small team, whatever. Team that supports systems I believe in, deserve support. Even if the game is a jumping puzzle - which I suck at.


* If I'm on Linux I'm programming. Scratches the same itch as games do in many ways.

 

[Haerthan]

Good. Now if Facebook could go die in a fucking hole.

The less data running around with our handles, emails and credit card numbers, the better.

 

[Lukasz]

What does it mean to steamgifts

Will it also stop working unless you opt in to public

 

[Don Reba]

Good. Now if Facebook could go die in a fucking hole.

The less data running around with our handles, emails and credit card numbers, the better.

Dude, don't post your credit card number on Facebook. You're supposed to have some common sense.

 

[nagi]

Well, I did say that I wanted to hide specific utilities from my steam profile page - as revealing I used them might open one to phishing or at the very least, information leak - but I honestly did not think Valve would do it. Also, I don't think I'd want to hide the games (as opposed to utilities) that I'm playing with. I might want to, would I be some teenager whose parents check if he did the homework or just played games all afternoon.

 

[phaolo]

This privacy setting is good for users, even if bad for a data aggregation site like Steam Spy. IMO Valve should just send an alert to all users, asking if they want to contribute to such graphs.
Btw, I doubt that it would cost Valve much to make an internal site like Steam Spy, with all their money..

 

[DeltaIO]

a company taking steps to protect their customer's privacy, seemingly for no benefit to themselves, cannot be ignored. That's excellent.

Both yes and no.

While I agree any steps taken to ensure customer data is kept private by default is great, I also have to wonder if this will impact game sales or communities of game titles in some way? The information provided did have some uses such as seeing how active a game population was.

It's a shame that there isn't some way for Steam to provide this data in an anonymised format in a similar vein as the hardware stats. Still, it does look like you'll still be able to share the information with friends using the service by opting in to do so.

 

[AxMi-24]

a company taking steps to protect their customer's privacy, seemingly for no benefit to themselves, cannot be ignored. That's excellent.

Both yes and no.

While I agree any steps taken to ensure customer data is kept private by default is great, I also have to wonder if this will impact game sales or communities of game titles in some way? The information provided did have some uses such as seeing how active a game population was.

It's a shame that there isn't some way for Steam to provide this data in an anonymised format in a similar vein as the hardware stats. Still, it does look like you'll still be able to share the information with friends using the service by opting in to do so.

Publishers are not exactly screaming for data of this kind to be published so if it Valve will start doing it it will be because customers demand it strongly. However, I very much doubt that any significant number of Steam users even knew something like Steam Spy existed.

Stronger privacy for all users at the expense of data used by vanishingly few is a good trade off and people can still opt-in and have their stats public if they actually do care about this data (which, again, I highly doubt)

 

[Myrwynn]

I'm personally sad to see Steam Spy go.
With the game industry being so miserly when it comes to publicizing sales stats and other data, Steam Spy could at least provide some insights into that. (Even though it obvisously doesn't cover consoles you could kind of extrapolate how successful a game would have been on there)