Sergey Galyonkin

Steam Spy now shows followers over time

It should allow you to gauge success of certain marketing events by tracking how many people start following a game.

Geography over time is back!

There were some data losses, but it's finally back!

Recent outage

Just wanted to apologize for the recent outage that happened several times over the last weekend. I think I've fixed it now, hopefully it should work as intended.

On the positive note, while doing that I found a bug that is related to the way geo information is calculated. Not sure if it's THE bug that prevents it from working, but fingers crossed. 

Update

The site is mostly back. The data is being gathered again, although there are still some issues with Steam API.

The machine learning is working too, but it seems to be crazy off for of big titles, namely Sekiro. Not sure if it's caused by data loss (and will even out later), or it's a fundamental issue with this version of the algorithm.

Thank you for bearing with me. The Patreon is still paused while I figure everything out.

Steam Spy is experiencing problems

The site is currently experiencing problems with gathering data from Steam. I'm not sure when I'll be able to fix them, that's why I paused Patreon charges for existing patrons until the situation is resolved.

If you're not a current supporter, please, refrain from backing Steam Spy at this time.

New feature: tags over time

You can now see how the game tags evolved over time. 

Also, I just noticed that Geography over Time is broken, so I'm going to work on a fix.

An algorithm update

The current plan is to roll-out the new algorithm this weekend. I've tried to launch it last weekend, but ran into some issues with accuracy, so decided to keep the existing one for one more week.

The idea is to use multiple algorithms for different games and different stages in a life cycle. I'll start with two for newly released games and for established titles. The current algorithm kinda overestimates the first week sales and then underestimates the long tail, so having two different algor...

New experimental algorithm

You might have noticed a new feature on the site: Players (experimental). It's a new algorithm to calculate the number of engaged players without relying on Steam Web API. It uses the machine learning algorithm as a foundation and then enhances its precision.

It's not perfect by any means, but seems to be more accurate than just pure ML. If your game has stats generated by this algorithm, please let me know if it's better for your or not :)

Venn diagrams and X-Analysis are back

My favorite features, X-Analysis and Venn diagrams are back.  

The biggest problem with them is that now they count only very engaged players, so they tend to overestimate the intersection of audiences. For the very same reason, both the average and median playtimes are higher than they should be.

But this error is consistent among games, so should still give you a general idea of the audience intersection.

Algorithm v5 is live

The new improved version is live and should estimate free-to-play games more correctly.

I've also changed the amount of data used for learning, so this iteration seems to be prone to overfitting. There is a couple of solutions to that, so maybe I'll push a hotfix on Sunday, if one of them works.

In other news, I've got a PhD candidate in neural networks helping me with the algorithm, so hopefully v6 or v7 will be even better.

The new algorithm is live

The v4 is live and all data since April 26 has been updated to use it.  It seems that this algorithm is more resilient against outliers, but its accuracy for regular games might have suffered slightly.

If you see any discrepancies, please, let me know.

Algorithm update incoming

You might have noticed that starting on April, 27th some games had their Steam Spy numbers jump a lot. This is related to the new algorithm, but not in the way you'd think. Actually, all the data on the site from April, 2nd is already calculated using the new method.

What happened is I fixed some data sources and suddenly the site started to get more information that I'm using for estimates. It caused over-inflation for some games, even though they were in the correct ballpark before.

Th...

Status update

Steam recently changed Store API - the one that reports games prices, genres and other basic info. I guess they were trying to improve the store's privacy :) 

Anyway, the basic data for yesterday was lost because of that. Fortunately, games do not change their prices (or their developers) very often, so that's not a huge tragedy. 

I've already developed a solution to alleviate this issue and its effect should be visible tomorrow.

I've also brought back the API in limited ...

The Sales page and yearly/monthly summaries are back

Enjoy!

One note, though: it will no longer display sales under 1,000 copies. This is intentional, as it's well below my margin of error.

Audience and playtime are back

Audience (2 weeks) is now displayed as share of total owners of the game. Playtime works as before and available to all users now, not just subscribers.

Status update

Playtime distribution, tag, genre, developer yearly and monthly summaries are back. Working on bringing back other features as well.

Geography over time is back

It's less precise than before, but seems to be in the ballpark.

 Enjoy! 

Connecting to Steam Spy's Discord

Steam Spy backers have access to the special Discord channel set up for people interested in gaming market stats. If you want to talk to fellow enthusiasts and follow the development of the site more closely, please link your Patreon and Discord accounts.

Here is a handy guide from Patreon on doing this.

Status update

I just rolled the new algorithm to the production version of Steam Spy.  As backers, you should be able to see the data calculated by it for data poinst starting  at 2nd of April 2018.

The algorithm only works for owners now and only on games pages. Number of players and average playtime are still calculated by the old algorithm and are incorrect. 

I would really appreciate if you could compare the new data on your titles to your real numbers and tell me if the algorithm i...

Status update

Ok, I'm certainly onto something, but so far the precision is way below what I wanted it to be.

Here is an example of a dataset calculated based on the new method without using any data from Steam API at all.

While it certainly seems to work on small and medium-sized games, the precision on  big titles is really terrible.

Also, reliably calculating the margin of error using this new m...

Status update

Hi. As you all know, Steam has changed their security settings to prevent Steam Spy and similar sites from accessing user information.  Here is my interview about it.

Going forward, Steam Spy still collect user information, but the number of queried profiles decreased significantly - from 2M per 3 days to 60K, give or take. All of those 60K users are ha...

Let's compare May 2015 and May 2016 on Steam

Overall, May 2016 was a bit better than May, 2015 in terms of total revenue and total copies moved. But both median sales and average price are going down a bit.

May, 2015

Games counted (with over 1,000 copies moved): 2144

Average userscore: 74.02%

Average metascore: 73.17%

Total copies moved: 22,744,546

Median copies moved: 3,800

Total revenue: $280,576,113

Average price: $11.31

Average discount: 16.5%

Top 20 gam...

The most viewed games on Steam Spy in May

Again, this list will probably not surprise you, but it's nice to know what people are looking at:

1. Stellaris

2. Battleborn

3. DOOM

4. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

5. Dark Souls III

6. Undertale

7. Total War: Warhammer

8. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

9. Stardew Valley

10. Dota 2

A bit on differences between 2016 and 2015

A year ago I wrote that an average game on Steam had 32,000 owners. I've just checked, and this number dropped to 21,000.

Obviously, I got interested and did some digging. Here are the results.

As you'd probably expect, we saw a lot of new games released since the last year, and they've skewed the numbers toward lower sales. But the distribution of sales (second graph) remains pretty much the same with some minor increase in lower sales and minor decrease in the middle.

New feature: played recently

Steam Spy now allows you to see what games owners of a particular game have played recently. I've designed it to track audience migration - a topic I'm researching right now. 

It should be useful to see if players go from being active in one game to play another game, or if they buy new stuff only when they've had enough of their previous favorite title.

In this case, we can see that 90% of Banner Saga 2 players owned the first one, but only 26% of them played it re...

Top viewed games on Steam Spy in the last week

No big surprises here: new games, indie wonders, and some VR titles.

1. DARK SOULS III

2. Stardew Valley

3. Enter the Gungeon

4. Job Simulator

5. Hyper Light Drifter

6. Undertale

7. Tower Unite

8. The Lab

9.FINAL FANTASY IX

10. Tom Clancy's The Division

11. HunieCam Studio

12. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

13.Fantastic Contraption

14.The Descendant

15.Audioshield

16.Grand Theft Auto V

17.Roll...

New feature: Cross-tag analysis and related tags

I've finally added an interface to analyze games with several tags assigned. Ever wondered how Adventure games with Female Protagonist perform? Check it here.

Now you can visit any tag, click Related Tags tab and dig deeper. Adventure + Survival + Crafting + Indie? Or 2016-03-28 07:54:32 +0000 UTC View Post

1 year of Steam Spy!

March, 27th marks the birthday of Steam Spy. Wow, a whole year!

To celebrate it I'm unlocking access to all Steam Spy features during this weekend. Enjoy!

Top viewed games on Steam Spy this week

Indies, indies everywhere! And some Chinese games as well.

1. Stardew Valley

2. Factorio

3. SUPERHOT

4. Rise of the Tomb Raider

5. Undertale

6. Grim Dawn

7. Street Fighter V

8. XCOM 2

9. 軒轅劍外傳穹之扉(The Gate of Firmament)

10. Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

11. Firewatch

12. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

13. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

14. Far Cry Primal

15. Deponia Doomsday

16. Layers o...

Is Steam losing, ahem, steam?

I'll see myself out, thank you.

But, seriously, the number of new users in 2015 was lower compared to 2014. We're probably close to reaching a saturation point in the nearest future.

New users understandably own fewer games but aren't playing any less. And that's good news.

Steam got amazing stickiness. People are still playing games on their accounts from 2003...