The recent outrage about Epic's game store has lead me to look at some of the names behind it and how it got to the point where it is now. The Director of Publishing Strategy at Epic Games is Sergey Galyonkin, the creator of SteamSpy and a master of monetizing free data.
With video games becoming more and more popular worldwide, interest in stats and sales numbers also grew. As a solution to this demand in the market Steam Charts was created in 2012. The website is very simple at its core with very accurate data regarding concurrent player numbers. All of this was made possible with Steam's public API that provided player counts for free.
Shortly after, other data tracking sites like SteamSpy and GitHyp started popping up around the same time in 2015. While sites like GitHyp featured Steam and Twitch stats for free, SteamSpy seemed like the better source for Steam data by providing sales numbers along with player counts. Exactly how SteamSpy makes up its sales number is where things get interesting.
I remember that Sergey Galyonkin tweeted that SteamSpy will be shutting down due to some changes in the Steam API. Those changes were made because some private information was shared with third-party websites like SteamSpy without the player's consent. Instead of shutting down his service, Galyonik decided to keep it up with a few paywalls here and there.
The example above shows how Sergey Galyonkin locked wildly inaccurate data behind a paywall. Since steam does not provide sales numbers, SteamSpy’s sales data ranges from pretty accurate to wildly inaccurate. As stated on his website, Galyonkin is asking for at least $10 per month to access his owner's data numbers on SteamSpy. But how exactly are these numbers made up?
Before the changes in the Steam API anyone could pull up your game library without permission. As the community caught on, Steam changed this but a new method came up. Since there was no way to figure out how many people actually bought a specific game someone figured out that you can make estimates using achievements.
barter.vg is a good example of how this can be done. They were looking at achievement data and extrapolating how many users would be necessary to get the percents shown. For example, if an achievement had “50%” of players achieving it, that would imply at least 2 players. “33%” implies at least 3. If a game has both of those, it implies at least 6 players (3/6 for the 50%, 2/6 for the 33%). Since this method is now also rendered obsolete due to API changes it is unclear how SteamSpy gets the sales data but this is definitely not the main point of this post.
The main issue I see here is not the accuracy of the data nor the method that SteamSpy uses. The issue here is that EPIC is a direct competitor to Steam in a huge market that is constantly growing. Conflict of interest could be the phrase I am looking for in this case.
Sergey Galyonkin uses Steam data to turn a profit of almost $14k per month by selling data that is provided for free. Sergey Galyonkin is also the Director of Publishing Strategy at Epic Games. You can't exclude a scenario where SteamSpy lowers the sales numbers on Steam intentionally to show that their own store made more sales and there would be no way to fact-check this.
Looking at his monetization methods on his own website, it wouldn't surprise me that he is also behind the terrible exclusive publishing deals that we're seeing now with games like Metro Exodus and The Division 2. It will definitely be interesting to see how this whole situation unfolds. Until we see an epilogue I would like to remind you that there is no need to pay $10 per month just to get sales estimates that could be complete rubbish. If you need game numbers and data Steam Charts and GitHyp should give you all the information you need completely free.