Steam Spy is a well known statistical/analytical service usually sourced to if someone wants a rough idea of what’s going on with a game data wise or its sales. Well, it looks like Valve itself wants to offer something better and more accurate than Steam Spy.
I’m sure you know of Steam Spy, right? The website created by Sergey Galyonkin some years ago, which uses an application programming interface (API) to the Steam software distribution service (owned by Valve Corp.) to estimate the number of sales of titles made.
Well, it looks like Valve feels that it can do better than Mr. Galyonkin in that during a recent event the company attended, White Nights, shared its thoughts on Steam Spy and how it feels it wasn’t all that accurate.
In a long string of tweets that the Steam Spy account on Twitter shared reveals the aforementioned. You can read over the tweets featured on said account right here:
The reason I opened Steam Spy to everyone was to let smaller developers make informed decisions based on data and to remove some of the information asymmetry that is so pervasive in our industry. Naturally, I am excited by Valve's decision to offer a better version of Steam Spy.
— Steam Spy (@Steam_Spy) June 29, 2018
As mentioned above in the duo of tweets is the Steam Spy account sharing his excitement regarding Valve creating a service/program or a site similar to Steam Spy, except it will be more accurate or better in layman terms.
If you want to see part of Valve’s presentation at White Nights and announce its response to Steam Spy, you can courtesy of Michael Kuzmin and Oleg Chumakov:
@kuzmitch_ru asking Mr. Jan-Peter Ewert from @steam_games about @Steam_Spy future. pic.twitter.com/kw8g0Twzka
— Oleg Chumakov (@GamesCodeDogs) June 28, 2018
If the video’s audio is bad for you, Valve’s head of business development, Jan-Peter Ewert, told Kuzmin:
“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.”
With that said, what are your thoughts on all of this?