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Steam Spy Announces It's Shutting Down, Blames Valve's New Privacy Settings
Steam Spy, the world's most comprehensive game ownership and play estimator available to the public, announced that it "won't be able to operate anymore" thanks to recent changes to Valve's privacy policy. "Valve just made a change to their privacy settings, making games owned by Steam users hidden by default," the site's operators announced on its official Twitter account. "Steam Spy relied on this information being visible by default." The creator of the website, Sergey Galyonkin, suggested that the site will only remain as an "archive" from here on out. Ars Technica reports: Indeed, Steam's new private-by-default setting is the kind of proactive, data-protective move that sites like Facebook have faced repeated scrutiny about over the past decade. However, as of press time, we could not confirm exactly how these updated settings will work, thanks to the service's "edit privacy settings" page currently appearing blank. (This can be found in the Steam interface by selecting the word "profile" under the menu that appears when mousing over your username.)
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, and that it will also specifically let players hide both game ownership and gameplay time counts from friends. The company explained that Tuesday's changes came "directly from user feedback," which Steam Spy founder Sergey Galyonkin questioned via his site's Twitter feed: "They said it was by users feedback which makes me as a person born in the Soviet Union very suspicious :)" After Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney applauded Valve's privacy-minded policy change, Galyonkin responded with his own opinion on why so much data was open on Steam in the first place: "This was always a compromise between being able to play with other people and privacy," he wrote in response. "It seems they moved towards privacy now."
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, and that it will also specifically let players hide both game ownership and gameplay time counts from friends. The company explained that Tuesday's changes came "directly from user feedback," which Steam Spy founder Sergey Galyonkin questioned via his site's Twitter feed: "They said it was by users feedback which makes me as a person born in the Soviet Union very suspicious :)" After Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney applauded Valve's privacy-minded policy change, Galyonkin responded with his own opinion on why so much data was open on Steam in the first place: "This was always a compromise between being able to play with other people and privacy," he wrote in response. "It seems they moved towards privacy now."
With all the sudden outrage over "data" it's no wonder companies would rather hide it. Who really wants to be the next target in a politically motivated outrage campaign?
Of course it has nothing to do with the current facebook fiasco that Valve decided to be more open to these requests that must have existed since the very day the launched Steam.
I remember quite a bit of pushback from people concerned with privacy and DRM proliferation in the early 2000's, who rejected Steam and all the other platforms after it for a long time. But in the end most of them caved in due to Steam's popularity. I'm one of them. And still I try to get the few games that I play in these times on alternatives like GOG if possible.
Having a website with "spy" in the name that is explicitly exists to expose data about users... yeah perhaps that's not going to fly anymore.
So, except for some vague data leech company losing out on income, how is this possibly a bad thing?
It's utterly counterintuitive to think that Steam users would not want a complete inventory of what they owned and how much they played it available to all of their friends (nothing like advertising to your CS:GO friends that you've played Hentai Strip Poker 3 for 120 hours).
And surely everyone wants the entire Steam community to know that they're online playing Steam games.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
But how will i live not knowing that a friend has added "A magical highschool girl" on his wishlist
Honestly I get what Steam is going for: i've looked up plenty of games' page, curious what was that game that is sucking up a friend's time. On the other hand, sometimes you just want to quietly have some solo time in a MMO...and not have the twenty people on your contacts login to 'party up'. It's cowardly in a way, to avoid simply saying 'no'...but at the same time, the issue need not arise in the first place. Here's to hoping you can have steam hide 'now playing' as well, without having one have to 'mask' the game with another game (clickers are good for this).
How many thousands of hours I have in games like Fallout 4 without getting "you beat the game!" achievements?
I turned on the privacy setting as soon as I figured out that publisher PR stooges were playing fan bois and attacking people with their history for negative reviews or comments. It was getting pretty annoying back they backed off when they could not force positive reviews and comments and people where often ragging on games more as a result of the negative interactions with publisher trolls, than the game itself. Gamers are becoming a lot more forward critiquing game developers and publishers, especially with regard to sticking it to their products. The negative reviews on steam are often the most informative.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
it will also specifically let players hide both game ownership and gameplay time counts from friends
I can finally purchase Secret of the Magic Crystals and breed new ponies to my heart's content without everyone giving me a hard time about trying to breed a unicorn!
(I work in game industry, completely unrelated to Valve.) reading the comments so far, it seems there's quite a lot of misunderstanding or misinterpretation what happened here. spoiler alert: it's about user privacy, but not exactly the sharing-with-others-for-commercial-purposes kind.
SteamSpy is a valuable resource to learn what the real popularity of a game is like, because it draws on (previously) open Steam APIs to estimate how many people do actually own the game, and how much it is being played. it is valuable because it allows one to get a good estimation on existing market size of a particular game genre segment. now, there are two parties who don't like this kind of transparency.
first, there are publishers who would very much love to hide lackluster performance of these titles, and keep the hype that "everyone is playing this HOT!! new title" in media through paid articles and ads. naturally SteamSpy breaks this kind of false narrative.
second, as a few folks correctly mentioned here, Steam's profile/friend system makes too many things public by default, and users ARE unhappy about it - since there is still a lot of stigma around playing computer games, and also sometimes you simply don't want to broadcast the fact that you're playing something to the world, or just want to be left alone. Steam friends feature is rather dated, as it was built with sharing and playing games together with your friends in mind, mostly for teenagers in 00s, so it offers relatively few ways to regulate what you want to make public and what you do not. in part, the information that you made available publicly is also available via Steam APIs, which allowed services such as SteamSpy to exist, although that wasn't really its original purpose.
so Steam is actually doing a good thing for its users by tightening up privacy controls, and restricting ways to access someone's status both inside the system and in the APIs. incidentally, this kills services such as SteamSpy, and also inadvertently helps game publishers to hide real numbers related to their titles' performance. oh well.
Oh good, now my wife won't see how much time I have spent playing Hatoful Boyfriend.
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
I think you grossly understating your second point. It isn't solely about stigma of playing games or even playing specific game. It is about producing more data that could be aggregated to create very precise profiles. As Cambridge Analytica showed us, you can scrape a lot of data from multiple sources and then produce a devastatingly effective spear-phising like manipulation. This is what highly undesirable outcome of leaking everyone's data.
Additionally, post gamergate every gamer should be cautious about privacy. We largely beat "moral police" back, but they will inevitably come back for the round 2. You have seen their methods - they dox, they try to get people fired, they use social media lynch mobs. I don't think it is that far-fetched to see these people producing public lists of "communist sympathizers" based on people playing specific title they disapprove of.
Nice sum up. As a developer, I couldn't care less about individuals and what or how much they're playing. Information about how titles are doing in a general sense is very useful and motivating. Unfortunately, it appears I can't have one without the other.
you have a good point. whether or not that consideration went into Valve's decision making with regards to Steam, we don't really know, but it certainly helps in this regard. me, personally I'm more lamenting the loss of a valuable red-pill source of market size info :) well at least vgchartz is still there.
It probably wouldn't be too hard to get the best of both worlds though. Allow users to authenticate with third-parties against Steam's OpenAPI equivalent to allow access to *their* data, while allowing anonymous data extracts to more global variables (e.g. how many discrete users are playing this game, age range, country, CPU/GPU etc) for unauthenticated services.
In the end, Steam is making money off of game (ok, and hat) sales, so they don't need to monetize your data in the same way that FB etc are, but that same data can still - if used correctly - be very useful to gamers and the industry at large if provided in a way that protects the privacy of the player.
> (nothing like advertising to your CS:GO friends that you've played Hentai Strip Poker 3 for 120 hours).
Exactly. In fact I expect that being able to (finally) go invisible on Steam will undoubtedly lead to more sales of games to people who for various social reasons didn't want to have the ownership and playing of those games broadcast to their friends. Reminds me of a story that was posted to another forum of odd game store encounters where one guy recounted working the till when a bunch of gang bangers came into the store and were all hyped up and boisterous for the new NBA release and they each bought a copy and left, then 20 minutes later one of the crew came back alone, much more subdued, to pick up the copy of Ni No Kuni he'd preordered.
well if Valve provided this information for everyone for free, that's where the first interested party might kick in. perhaps Valve doesn't want any negative consequences in relationship with game publishers, and perhaps street cred gained from doing something to "the industry at large" is not enough for them as a compensation.
in theory, Valve could be selling this kind of service. I don't know if they do, but if that is the case, they certainly have good reasons to shut down a free service that would give away this same information. which doesn't contradict what they did in their new privacy policy :)
uh, like cambridge steamalytics, only Gabe "teh god of sales" Newell didnt make money off of it and probably wont mind not appearing in front of congress for something he didnt ask for , and i dont think anyone else did. On top of that they can provide the service themselves as an opt-in like "do you want to participate in our beta of blablabla" , which leaves it down to the user , which is good ... ampersandx2 logical the fact that it requires steam is one thing, but the other thing is steam virtually stands as rocksolid proof that piracy is to blame on old money not adapting, i still havent seen one article up to today where valve or the big man himself actually complains about mister Roberts stealing his 13th ferrari for the year, so that gets respect, and origin and all the others are running after the facts, like microsoft trying to get in the smartphone game. Which reminds me, its been so long since i booted origin i forgot my login AGAIN... i hope the EA service is (still) better than the EA "service" if you catch my little drift here. If i had to pick i would vote for plugins to let origin run under steam where one achievement system fits all (and whats the other one worth mentioning? ubi thing something ? ... i think those two are blocking the flow)
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?