Valve is working on the "more accurate" replacement of Steam Spy sales data

In April, Valve launched a privacy policy change that effectively hindered Steam Spy in its method inspired by Ars Technica to estimate Game sales data based on public users. Profile information. Jan-Peter Ewert, Business Development Manager at Valve, says the company "is working on new tools and new ways to extract data from Steam," which she hopes "more accurate and useful than previously proposed Steam Spy.

In a question-and-answer session after a presentation at the White Nights Games Conference in St. Petersburg (19459017) captured by Oleg Chumakov on Twitter ), Ewert stated that Steam's overall position is to provide open APIs. we do not offer the amount of tools we should, the community can step in. "In the case of Steam Spy, however, random sampling of user data from this API to extrapolate sales data has led to" a large variance in the accuracy of the operation. Ewert explained that he thought the Steam game creators needed "something better than Steam Spy" to help them keep up with the sales and popularity trends in the Steam market. "To be clear, we do not have any company selling iPhones," Ewert said in stark contrast to the Apple App Store download template. "The only way to make money is to make the right decisions by bringing the right games to the platform and finding your audience."

The kind of detailed sales information that helps game makers make such decisions can be hard to come by. the video game industry unless you are willing to pay analysts for expensive reports. Members of the public and smaller developers need to rely on extremely limited regional sales rankings published by sources such as NPD, Chart-Track and Media Create to get a sense of the shape of the market (which excludes often purely digital sales

Better sales reports directly from a platform as large as Steam would do wonders for the public's understanding of the functioning of the gaming market; it would be something similar regular Nielsen TV ratings and ticket revenue Even generic Steam-based sales reports based on Valve's gender or tagging system would help add transparency to a sometimes opaque market

Growth, VR, and the police of taste

Elsewhere in his presentation photos of participant Michael Kuzmin ), Ewert presented slides Tives emphasizing that Valve "are not the font of taste" when it comes to games on its service and that the company does not "sell advertising space. The statement came a few weeks after Valve released new Steam content guidelines that only limit games to "illegal or direct" content. This latter group apparently still includes games such as Active Shooter and AIDS Simulator leaving open the question of where the troll monitoring begins and where the "police" begins. of taste "

. The presentation acknowledged Steam's overcrowding problem – which now includes about 180 published games each week – as "the elephant in the room" when it comes to developing for the platform. But his presentation also reiterated Steam's position that "big games find their audience" through filtering algorithms that help players find games that interest them.

The presentation also highlights the continued growth of the player base. This growth may be due in large part to the growing presence of Steam in China – Ewert data show that Simplified Chinese is now roughly equal to English in both countries.

The slides once again reaffirmed Valve's commitment to virtual reality as a "thriving market," citing the company's ongoing work on the new controllers and base stations of the platform. SteamVR. According to Ewert's slides, Steam data indicates a 160% increase in the monthly use of virtual reality on the platform, which certainly does not suggest a decreasing trend that will quickly become irrelevant .