Steamspy ((top)) 【macOS】

The service typically provides estimates for:

: The service operates by taking daily snapshots of a random sample of public Steam user profiles.

Steam Spy was born from an idea by Kyle Orland of Ars Technica, who suggested using the Steam Web API to poll public user profiles. steamspy

: The accuracy of ownership estimates dropped sharply as the sample size of "public" profiles plummeted.

In April 2018, Valve introduced revamped privacy features that set Steam profiles to "private" by default. This change essentially "blinded" the original SteamSpy algorithm, making it impossible to crawl public data as effectively as before. The service typically provides estimates for: : The

In April 2018, Valve (owner of Steam) changed its privacy policy. By default, all Steam user profiles were set to (users could no longer be automatically scraped). This change was made to comply with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in Europe.

Launched by Sergey Galyonkin, SteamSpy is a statistics service that automatically gathers data from Steam user profiles to estimate game ownership and other vital metrics. It fills a critical information gap by providing: In April 2018, Valve introduced revamped privacy features

SteamSpy then uses this data to generate estimates of a game's revenue and player count. These estimates are based on a variety of factors, including the game's sales data, player engagement, and market trends.

Since then, SteamSpy has struggled to maintain its former reliability. While it still exists, its estimates are now considered rough approximations rather than trustworthy data points. Sergey Galyonkin himself stated that after the privacy change, the service could no longer provide accurate data.

| Aspect | Detail | |--------|--------| | | Sergey Galyonkin | | Launch Year | 2015 | | Primary Data | Estimated game owners, playtime, regional stats | | Accuracy Peak | 2015 – early 2018 (often within 10-20% of true figures) | | Accuracy Today | Low to moderate (biased sample, wide margins of error) | | Best Use Today | Comparing relative popularity between games, not absolute sales | | Free? | Yes (basic data), with a paid API for developers |