My mistake. I was thinking of the old way of using bots to trawl through each individual profile webpage instead of using the api, but my knowledge on this subject is very limited, so I am not sure if there is much difference between one and the other. Just that Valve, at least if my memory serves me, much preferred the latter to the former.
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Paradox Interactive requests their data to be removed from SteamSpy
- Thread starter Enter the Dragon Punch
- Start date
My mistake. I was thinking of the old way of using bots to trawl through each individual profile webpage instead of using the api, but my knowledge on this subject is very limited, so I am not sure if there is much difference between one and the other. Just that Valve, at least if my memory serves me, much preferred the latter to the former.
What a BS excuse, every time we've seen a publisher or dev share PC sales data Steamspy's numbers have been extremely close to those numbers.
Imperfected
Member
I'm not sure what part of this you think overrides the logic I presented.
Horsemama1956
Member
What are you talking about? There are millions of Steam keys being sold for dirt cheap and many of them get traded on forums and activated. There is no way to know how much $ is being generated with each "owner" listed by SteamSpy.
I don't get why people care how much a game sells anyway?
Nikodemos
Member
Because I don't buy that game to play it. I just see a low price for something in a genre I like.
YianGaruga
Banned
And where do thos keys come from?
Even if a key is sold for $1 it's a sale.
No one is saying that you are (or should be) able to get revenue data from Steam spy. You can never get that from sales numbers anyway, even paradox' official sales numbers. In the end, a sale is a sale and that's where the number of owners comes from.
Owner and sales data is interesting and useful on its own, without any knowledge about revenue.
There is, to an extent. These millions of keys are typically in existence because of previous budget sales, like bundles, which are a matter of record.
For something like say, Stellaris, which just came out and has nearly 500k owners, and has no retail release nor notable sales, it is easy get a rough estimate of the actual sales. Not 100 percent accurate, as their are sites like Greenmangaming that have 20 percent coupons.
With sites like istheranydeal tracking sales and bundle history, steamspy, wayback machine, it's relatively simple to know the rough history of sales by simply comparing and contrasting data.
The secondhand trading market is not something that is generally going to be statistically relevant to a game's overall figures as well.
Imperfected
Member
Try to imagine that I'm a member of the sales team.
I don't care if you're buying the game to play it or buying the game on "impulse". I care that I got a sale in the first quarter of the fiscal year. The fact I put the game on discount during a Steam event turned that Wishlist entry into a sale. Nothing else ever enters into the equation.
The Paradox dude's point is that he keeps having conversations with folks, conversations that begin based on an unfortunate fallacy: "SteamSpy says we sold X copies, multiply that by full price and the result must be our actual revenue". There's two ways to prevent this: Either restrict both sales and revenue numbers, or publicize both sales and revenue numbers. The only dev I can think of that has done the latter is Yacht Club, and it's really cool of them to do so, as it really should be the developer's decision.
YianGaruga
Banned
Unfortunately, none of us are in a position to make such a judgment.
There's not much Valve can do, besides make the data mining harder (and more server intensive on their end). User profiles and their games library are public unless you specifically opt out. Just like Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media source that is public, anyone is free to data mine the public results. Statistics can easily model the missing data fairly accurately.
Sergey is free to run his website as he sees fit, but if too many of the larger pubs opt out, Steamspy as a whole will be of much less use, and someone else who doesn't give a shit what publishers want or don't want to make public will just do the same thing for themselves.
Ars Technica was doing something similar for articles a year or so before Steamspy was a thing.
Does make me wonder a little bit...
ashecitism
Member
MassiveNights
Banned
I don't see the problem in their justification for it.
They want to accurately report numbers to the industry insider outlet, something within their own control.
They have no obligation to provide transparency when it comes to sales number so people can gossip about it on message boards and I don't really know why anyone would be disappointed, think less of Paradox or think this is a backwards step.
They want to accurately report numbers to the industry insider outlet, something within their own control.
They have no obligation to provide transparency when it comes to sales number so people can gossip about it on message boards and I don't really know why anyone would be disappointed, think less of Paradox or think this is a backwards step.
D
Deleted member 47027
Unconfirmed Member
It isn't a problem. Everyone wants to feel like they're part of something, even when they have no business being a part of something. The people angry are being left out, but they should be left out. If they're that worried about it, then do the legwork. Context is everything and managing that context, as a business, is important work. So let em work.
As someone who's managed Sales people and their pipelines, I understand their reasoning as well. I can imagine the meetings and conversations that lead to this decision.
They aren't providing anything, the data has always been open, Valve added an API so that people wouldn't waste their server capacity data mining user profiles. Steamspy is just putting all that data together on a website.
It's not Paradox's data, it's Valve's and Valve seems to have no problem with it being out there. Steamspy is acting out of good faith towards Paradox.
Lord of Ostia
Member
Right, the grey market for key reselling has to be part of the inaccuracies they are talking about. Sure those represent units sold at some point in most cases, but not necessarily at the same price as someone who bought the game from Steam. So saying that you must've made X number of money from X number of owners on Steam isn't an accurate account of your actual earnings on the title. Honestly, most people realize this anyway, but clearly it is a cause for confusion and they'd rather not deal with it.
Just found out that this was removed by request after noticing the Paradox data had been missing. Reading the quotes from the Paradox rep I feel like this:
is misguided. I would welcome this as the ultimate red flag personally. Anyone hinging their business plan on only Steamspy data is not a company you want to work with.
is misguided. I would welcome this as the ultimate red flag personally. Anyone hinging their business plan on only Steamspy data is not a company you want to work with.
Should go without saying.