[Updated] SteamSpy and SteamDB plan on shutting down due to Valve game library changes

[ItsMitch]

Source: SteamSpy | Valve Corp

SteamSpy, a data gather of Steam Games and a general aggregator of statistics for Steam are planning on shutting down due to unforeseen Privacy Changes made by Valve. In a few tweets, the company stated it was due to Valve making people's game pages hidden by default and thus would effect SteamSpy drastically.

Valve made this blog post on their forums - https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1667896941884942467

Quote

Today’s update expands on your Profile Privacy Settings Page, giving you more control over the privacy of your Steam account. With more detailed descriptions of what profile information is included in each category, you will be able to manage how you are viewed by your friends, or the wider Steam Community.

You can now select who can view your profile’s “game details”; which includes the list of games you have purchased or wishlisted, along with achievements and playtime. This setting also controls whether you’re seen as “in-game” and the title of the game you are playing.

Additionally, regardless of which setting you choose for your profile’s game details, you now have the option to keep your total game playtime private. You no longer need to nervously laugh it off as a bug when your friends notice the 4,000+ hours you've put into Ricochet.

Looking ahead a little, we are also working on a new “invisible” mode in addition to the already existing “online”, “away” and “offline” presence options. If you choose to set yourself to invisible, you’ll appear as offline, but you’ll still be able to view your friends list, send and receive messages. Sometimes you’re feeling social, and sometimes you’re not; this setting should help Steam users be social on their own terms. We hope to have this feature ready for beta release soon.

3

Steam Database or SteamDB did a tweet this morning explaining that it's calculator will now be opt-in service

So Steam just single handedly killed two great services that operate. Nice

 

[Eduard the weeb]

F

[ItsMitch]

3 minutes ago, Eduard the weeb said:

F

Pretty much, shitty day. Also this may be related to the recent Europe GDPR legislation which has gone into effect (Still trying to verify)

[ItsMitch]

EuroGamer did a QnA with SteamSpy founder on the issues, long post, sry 

How's it all going on your end?

Sergey Galyonkin: Well, I'm trying to figure out what would be my next best step. It seems like I have several options, relying on different methods of gathering information. But the margin of error would be so high that I don't think they make a lot of sense.

So what happened yesterday, from your perspective? Did you know this update was coming?

Sergey Galyonkin: No, I did not. I just found out about it when a person messaged me on Twitter. Valve never informs anyone of any changes, so it's not surprising really. What they did was post it in their blog post, while rolling out their privacy changes. They made users' game libraries hidden by default and that's what makes Steam Spy operate. Steam Spy uses user libraries to understand what users have and then extrapolate data based on that. I don't know why they did it.

Do you get the feeling that this change has happened because of Steam Spy?

Sergey Galyonkin: I really don't know. For a moment I was thinking that it was related to GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) laws going live in Europe in May, but if they wanted to be compliant with those laws they should have hidden all profile information. Right now they have sensitive information exposed by default and only the game libraries are hidden. It doesn't really make sense.

What kind of sensitive information?

Sergey Galyonkin: The user's real name, twitter handles and all this stuff. It's all exposed by default.

So does that suggest this update was, in fact, targeting Steam Spy?

Sergey Galyonkin: I mean, there are easier ways to block Steam Spy. If I understand correctly, what they did also broke the ability for players to join their friends in games, because they can't see who owns what. I think if they wanted to just shut down Steam Spy, they would have taken an easier route.

And I'm guessing you've had no correspondence with Valve?

Sergey Galyonkin: No. My previous experience with Valve is that they don't answer any emails.

Have you got any kind of relationship with them? Before this point, have you talked to them about Steam Spy at all?

Sergey Galyonkin: Before launching Steam Spy, I used to work with Valve because I worked for a company that released a couple of game on Steam. Back then, it was way before Greenlight started, they were quick to answer. But after Greenlight happened, they stopped replying.

When I launched Steam Spy, I was met with complete silence. I've only received one email related to Steam Spy from them.

What was that email?

Sergey Galyonkin: It was when I asked them if I could make Steam Spy a commercial enterprise. They said I would be fine on Patreon, but not with anything else.

As of right now, where are you at? Are you really shutting Steam Spy down?

Sergey Galyonkin: I will probably shut down the Patreon, because I feel it's unfair to charge people for access to past information, without new information going in. I have an option to continue with other methods of extrapolation. They will be less precise. So if I do it, I will just keep that information to myself, I guess. I've seen information with account-level precision being misused, I don't want information with less precision being misused as well. So I will just use it myself.

What kind of margin of error is acceptable for you, when looking at alternatives?

Sergey Galyonkin: It depends, you know. It's different for me and for other people. Myself, I usually look at trends. Other people, I see use Steam Spy quite differently, they search particular games. The margin of error for particular games would be kind of bad.

So as of right now, unless another method presents itself, the public face of Steam Spy is done?

Sergey Galyonkin: Yeah, pretty much. I will keep the archive online.

As well as doing Steam Spy, you work at Epic Games. So this isn't the be all and end all for you?

Sergey Galyonkin: No, no. Steam Spy was a nice side source of income, but I was not doing it for the money. I'm good.

How does Epic feel about Steam Spy? Have they ever had any issues with it?

Sergey Galyonkin: Not really. I had a clause in my contract that allows me to run a couple of side projects: one of them is Steam Spy and the other is a game developers podcast I run. Epic was cool about it and we use Steam Spy ourselves a lot. It has been a good source of information for us.

So what's next? Will you move onto another side project?

Sergey Galyonkin: I will probably continue with the version of Steam Spy that I intend to use myself, but I will probably not make it public.

So that's something you'll just use to inform your own role at Epic?

Sergey Galyonkin: Yeah. I also have something called Twitch Spy, which is pretty much a database with no front end. It allows me to check on people's streaming, the games that are being streamed, who's rising and who's not. How subscriber counts and follower counts are influenced by the games they play. It's actually rather interesting. You can see that sometimes a person will be jumping from game to game to game and certain games will perform extremely well for them. And sometimes different people, trying to stream the exact same game, will see a decrease in followers. It's fascinating to watch, but right now it's just a database with no front end. I might do that, if I have time.

And finally, what do you make of the argument that this change is actually good for Steam users in terms of privacy?

Sergey Galyonkin: Giving users a small amount of control over their privacy settings is a step in the right direction. Making all of interface changes they've done is a good step. But the fact that they made only partial information from user profiles, rather than hiding all sensitive information is obviously weird. I don't understand why they'd do that. But I mean, it's Valve...

Thanks for your time Sergey. You seem remarkably calm given the last 24 hours.

Sergey Galyonkin: I knew it was going to happen at some point. It wasn't exactly a big surprise. And I still have a small side project called Fortnite to think about anyway.

[Ryujin2003]

I'm happy for the invisible. Sometimes I want to play by myself and not have all of my friends yet to jump in on MP. This past in happy for.

 

Also, I know it goes against most people's opinions, but I like that they care a little bit about my privacy. I don't really like all of my statistics and games being available to anyone with a web browser. If these organizations can collect it, then anyone else can get it and use it for advertisements or other solicitation purposes.

[NoRomanBatmansAllowed]

I understand privacy and all that, but it was this openness that made the internet function.

 

Now with the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook all the companies are pulling back what people can access.

 

As much as I love my privacy, making it private by default I feel is going to change the whole feel of the internet as a whole. Good maybe on a personal level, but I also work on a web scraper software so this is going in a not-so-great direction for that.

[Jito463]

43 minutes ago, Ryujin2003 said:

I don't really like all of my statistics and games being available to anyone with a web browser.

How did having a profile set to private affect that?  Didn't that already block that information from being visible?

[ItsMitch]

6 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

How did having a profile set to private affect that?  Didn't that already block that information from being visible?

Pretty much, SteamDB pulled directly from user profile that was visable, but now all profiles and game libs will be private, thus rendering DB a pointless task. 

[Ryujin2003]

14 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

How did having a profile set to private affect that?  Didn't that already block that information from being visible?

The whole Opt In vs Opt Out concept. The user should have the privacy rights respected initially, and if they WANT to share, then they can Opt In by making their profile not private.

[ItsMitch]

11 minutes ago, Ryujin2003 said:

The whole Opt In vs Opt Out concept. The user should have the privacy rights respected initially, and if they WANT to share, then they can Opt In by making their profile not private.

Then what about companies that are dedicated towards stats like SteamDB? They only want your game list, that's it, what's the huge deal over it? Only issue I see is that you have some embarrassing steam games you don't want sharing. 

[Ryujin2003]

24 minutes ago, SC2Mitch said:

Then what about companies that are dedicated towards stats like SteamDB? They only want your game list, that's it, what's the huge deal over it? Only issue I see is that you have some embarrassing steam games you don't want sharing. 

Or you have the ability for financial correlation. Those with more games.. inference is higher income. If they can see the region accessed, they can correlate it to population. Far stretch, but this could be used by marketers to analyze, and potentially divides in racial population based on location and game content (value), and be used for game development and advertisements towards specific groups of users instead of general advertisements or what not. Additionally, could be used by anyone trying to get into an account or some other malicious reason.

 

Not generally a tin foil hat wearing type of person, but I'm generally leery of companies financial motivations...

 

Not entirely sure why this information needed to be publicly accessible to begin with..

 

Sites like https://steamdb.info/calculator/ and https://steamcompanion.com/calculator/ used to be able to show the financial worth of an account based on game purchase price. These sites don't necessarily work now because Steam changed the privacy content. I used to be able to see my stuff, but cannot now. So I cannot demo what it used to show.

 

[Eaglerino]

3 hours ago, Ryujin2003 said:

I'm happy for the invisible. Sometimes I want to play by myself and not have all of my friends yet to jump in on MP. This past in happy for.

 

Also, I know it goes against most people's opinions, but I like that they care a little bit about my privacy. I don't really like all of my statistics and games being available to anyone with a web browser. If these organizations can collect it, then anyone else can get it and use it for advertisements or other solicitation purposes.

...you can set it to private on your own. You really need Valve to do it for you?

[Trixanity]

2 hours ago, Eaglerino said:

...you can set it to private on your own. You really need Valve to do it for you?

Yes, because that's the way it should be.

Or as a bare minimum prompt the user initially. It's bad practice to do otherwise.

[Guest The Viking]

I mean, this goes back to the issue of whether companies are allowed to make changes to how they work or not.

 

I understand SteamDB and Steamspy were great tools but they just built out to provide third-party data and Valve isn't responsible for those. They also made trading CSGO skins harder recently, making gambling harder, so eh.

 

I checked a friend's profile and can see all his games though, but not if I'm logged out. Interesting (my profile):

 

 

You used to be able to see the games list between the guides and stuff and the comments

 

But I can still see who's ingame and who isn't? Confussing.

 

edit:

 

easy to change if anybody's interested

 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

19 hours ago, SC2Mitch said:

 

So Steam just single handedly killed two great services that operate. Nice

 

Well, tough luck. It's not their fault that Steam is terrible, but if they absolutely need Steam to be terrible to exist, then I probably won't shed a tear for their demise.

 

 

7 hours ago, bob51zhang said:

I understand privacy and all that, but it was this openness that made the internet function.

I don't think everyone's data being publicly available is "the openness that made the internet function". Actually, I pretty sure that the internet functioning came first, data mining came later.

 

 

6 hours ago, SC2Mitch said:

Then what about companies that are dedicated towards stats like SteamDB?

In the real world, people dedicated to stats (and far more important stats than Steam's, like social scientists) have to deal with people's privacy every day. And that's a good thing.

 

6 hours ago, SC2Mitch said:

They only want your game list, that's it, what's the huge deal over it? 

And then we ask why people use Facebook...  They want it? Fine, what's so bad about asking for it? What's with this reliance on people not noticing it?

 

4 hours ago, Eaglerino said:

...you can set it to private on your own. You really need Valve to do it for you?

You can set it to public on your own. You really need Valve to do it for you?

 

Oh, apparently, yes you do, because the moment these services become opt-in they go out of service... which says a lot about their nature.

 

 

Seeing the double standards when it comes to data collection, I'm sort of glad we still have enough dinosaurs around regulating privacy, but I'm worried about what the future will bring once Generation Facebook becomes a sizable fraction of total voters. 

 

[Ryujin2003]

6 hours ago, Eaglerino said:

...you can set it to private on your own. You really need Valve to do it for you?

I can do that, and I did. But it should be fine by default. Should have privacy respected off the bat, and have things be opt in not opt out.

[divito]

My only problem with such things by default, is that it shouldn't be hidden away in the settings without some type of notification. Kind of like a pop-up explaining the things they've turned off, and what it controls, then I can make an informed decision.

I can see the issue with trying to have a notification tell you about 50 toggles you could have activated, but at the very least, if they're relevant functions that impact usability of a piece of software or service, advertising the default policy and the opt-in/opt-out nature of something would be beneficial, at least to me.

While it's a typical habit for me to install something, and look through settings and preferences, the relevance of some functions sometimes goes unexplained. Some companies are getting better at having descriptions with toggles and such, but more need to do it.

[mynameisjuan]

3 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Well, tough luck. It's not their fault that Steam is terrible

You cant be serious?

[Eaglerino]

8 hours ago, Ryujin2003 said:

I can do that, and I did. But it should be fine by default. Should have privacy respected off the bat, and have things be opt in not opt out.

All it does is delete information. Probably because developers were complaining people could see how many people were actually buying their game. If this really bothers you, Valve should just make it all anonymous.

 

It's like when Bungie for Destiny 2 removed their active players page because it "pushed a false narrative" when they really meant "we lost 2 million players in a month and in another month everyone will see we can't keep players." It's also probably why Activision wants to put the next CoD on their launcher exclusively, that way they can avoid Steam reviews that Activision can currently do nothing about and keep people from seeing how many people are actually playing the game before the buy it. Why would someone buy the new CoD on PC when the Steam reviews say it's filled with hackers and crappy servers?

 

This makes me sad because less information is always a bad thing. If one or two people (like you) want to opt out it doesn't hurt the overall statistics since there's such a huge pool to pull from.

[NoRomanBatmansAllowed]

11 hours ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

I don't think everyone's data being publicly available is "the openness that made the internet function". Actually, I pretty sure that the internet functioning came first, data mining came later.

 

Ok.

 

Maybe datat mining made "web 2.0" function.

 

Even in the earlier days, everything was open because it never needed to be closed. Just university & students messing around on message boards.

[Stefan Payne]

On 12.4.2018 at 6:57 AM, Eaglerino said:

...you can set it to private on your own. You really need Valve to do it for you?

Yes, because bad defaults are bad.

And setting it to private in the beginning is good because most peopöe don't know about this stuff.

 

 

Those 'share all my data' Defaults are just bullshit.

 

[Stefan Payne]

On 11.4.2018 at 4:15 PM, SC2Mitch said:

So Steam just single handedly killed two great services that operate. Nice

No, they did it to themselves.

Their "Service" was very likely in violation with European data privacy laws. 

That Valve/Steam might change the settings to a more private one should be as obvios as the Amen in Chruch.

 

To say that they didn't see it coming is just ignorant...

Because data privacy is one of the few things left where gouvernments in Europe are on the side of the people. 

And we have some pretty neat organisations that fight for Data Privacy for example the Chaos Computer Club.

 

So Buttom line is that they should have known that this change would have happen any day.

Data Privacy is a thing in Europe, people fight for that. 

We have gouvernment Officials that are responsible for Data Privacy. We call that "Datenshutzbeauftragter". (Translates to something like Data Protection/Privacy Officer or so).

[Xander Cousins]

Am I the only one that am slightly confused by this? Like yes I understand the fact that Data privacy is a thing and all but when setting  up an account you can change it to be private DURING your setup. Like fine changing the default to be more secure ain't a bad thing I know that, But again I ain't too worried about people seeing what games I have and what I have in my inventory as well it's nothing to be protective of. Like really what's the point of having your game library hidden if you can show off all the games you have?

 

So I can see both sides why its a mixed basket, Because some want all their data hidden (which is understandable) and some want people to see what they have. 

 

My only plus side would be you wouldn't get spammed by the CS:GO Free cases bots that come around constantly after playing a single game.