Valve working on new ‘more accurate’ tools to replace Steam Spy

Valve is working on tools that will allow developers to track the market, to provide a replacement for Steam Spy’s lost features.

Speaking at the White Nights Conference in St Petersburg last week, Valve’s head of business development Jan-Peter Ewert discussed the topic, following a question by Michael Kuzmin, head of business development at Russian studio HeroCraft. Mentioning how developers lost a great tool when Steam Spy’s got effectively killed after Valve changed its default user settings, he then asked what plans or ideas Valve had to provide a replacement.

Ewert replied: “Our general approach has always been to provide open APIs so that when we don’t offer the amount of tools that we should, the community can step in.” However, he then pointed out how Steam Spy “was very accurate for some games” but also “very inaccurate for others.”

He added: “The only that way we can make money is if [ developers] make good decisions in bringing the right games to the platform and finding your audience.”

He continued by saying developers need “something better than Steam Spy,” adding: “We are very much working on new tools and new ways of getting data out of Steam, and we hope that data can be more accurate and more useful than what Steam Spy previously offered you.”

You can watch a video of the exchange below, filmed by developer Oleg Chumakov:

@kuzmitch_ru asking Mr. Jan-Peter Ewert from @steam_games about @Steam_Spy future. pic.twitter.com/kw8g0Twzka

— Oleg Chumakov (@GamesCodeDogs) June 28, 2018

Steam Spy was left without data to use in April, after Valve changed Steam’s Profile Privacy Settings Page, making everyone’s gaming library hidden by default, a setting that Steam Spy developer Sergey Galyonkin relied on to get analytics data.