Indie developer taught Steam Spy to get more accurate data on game sales
The developer of the indie platformer The End is Night, Tyler Glaiel, gave the Steam Spy service a code that, according to him, will increase the accuracy of estimates of game sales on Steam.
Glayel suggested analyzing data on player achievements, as they can provide additional information about how many users have bought the game.
Usually Steam Spy operates by this method: the service regularly processes data on a random sample of players and then extrapolates them to the entire audience of the store, which makes the estimate very approximate. The method proposed by Glayel allows you to find out what specific number of Valve users used for their game achievement statistics.
Glayel noted that Steam Spy has already started using his code. The developer also posted the code in open access on GitHub.
Steam Spy was created in April 2015 by Sergey Galenkin, now director of publishing strategy at Epic Games. In April 2018, Valve updated Steam’s privacy settings, allowing users to hide vishlists and information about how much time they spent in the game. Because of this, Steam Spy had to suspend data updates.
On June 28, at the White Nights conference in St. Petersburg, Valve representative Jan-Peter Ewert, answering a question about Steam Spy, announced that Valve is working on a service that will provide more accurate data on game sales.
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