Sergey Galyonkin posts
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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 ...
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.The ...
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 capacity. I u...
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 is off and by how much. I don...
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 method is rather difficult.Will keep you updated.
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 hardcore players that own a lot of games, so this particular data is still useful for X-Analysis or geography, but not so much for stats on owners or...
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, 2015Games counted (with over 1,000 copies moved): 2144Average userscore: 74.02%Average metascore: 73.17%Total copies moved: 22,744,546Median copies moved: 3,800Total revenue: $280,576,113Average price: $11.31Average discount: 16.5%Top 20 games total earnings: $96,558,196Top 10 by revenue:The Witcher 3: Wild HuntGrand Theft Auto VCou...
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. Stellaris2. Battleborn3. DOOM4. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt5. Dark Souls III6. Undertale7. Total War: Warhammer8. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive9. Stardew Valley10. 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.Or, in layman te...
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 onegame 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 recently. So BS2 works m...
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 III2. Stardew Valley3. Enter the Gungeon4. Job Simulator5. Hyper Light Drifter6. Undertale7. Tower Unite8. The Lab9.FINAL FANTASY IX10. Tom Clancy's The Division11. HunieCam Studio12. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive13.Fantastic Contraption14.The Descendant15.Audioshield16.Grand Theft Auto V17.RollerCoaster Tycoon World18.The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt19.Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege20.Dota 2
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 Action + MMORPG + Free-to-play?This feature is similar to X-Analysis for games, but for tags. For users with advanced access rights it also displays graphs over time and audience analysis.Hope you find it useful :)
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 Valley2. Factorio3. SUPERHOT4. Rise of the Tomb Raider5. Undertale6. Grim Dawn7. Street Fighter V8. XCOM 29. 軒轅劍外傳穹之扉(The Gate of Firmament)10. Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc11. Firewatch12. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt13. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive14. Far Cry Primal15. Deponia Doomsday16. Layers of Fear17. Disgaea PC18. Portal Knights19. Romance of the Three Kingdoms 13 / 三國志1320. NEKOPARA Vol. 2
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 gamesbut aren't playing any less. And that's good news.Steam got amazing stickiness. People are still playing games on their accounts from 2003!
