Steam's New Privacy Settings Effectively Render SteamSpy, SteamCharts Useless
If you enjoyed using sites like SteamSpy or SteamCharts to find things out about your favorite games, you may be out of luck now.
If you typically used SteamSpy for all your Steam analytic needs, those days look like they're coming to an end. Thanks to a series of user privacy settings brought into motion by Steam, the very fabric of the game streaming platform that SteamSpy utilized to harvest its valuable data has been obliterated. The result? The end of valuable services that offered a treasure trove of important information to users.
SteamSpy is an analytics-focused site that helps determine how many players own a specific game, how many concurrent users a game had at one point, and other tidbits of useful information that many, including journalists, utilized when writing articles or making buyign decisions.
Valve's blog post explains that all users' game libraries will now be set to private by default, meaning all those floundering game libraries out there in cyberspace will be unreachable to SteamSpy. This is exactly what SteamSpy, and incidentally, other services like SteamCharts, used for gathering the very data that formed the backbone of both services.
Valve just made a change to their privacy settings, making games owned by Steam users hidden by default.
— Steam Spy (@Steam_Spy) April 11, 2018
Steam Spy relied on this information being visible by default and won't be able to operate anymore.https://t.co/0ejZgRQ6Kd
While there are additional privacy options for players and more detailed pieces of information that should help with figuring out what parts of your profile you want to share publicly, this is an unfortunate turn of events that will put some very useful websites out of business.
Creator Sergey Galyonkin took to Twitter to voice his own concerns about Valve's changes, stating that “Steam Spy relied on [game details] information being visible by default and won’t be able to operate anymore."
It's certainly a disappointing outcome, especially since SteamSpy has been a reliable source of insider information over the years. Valve obviously hasn't commented on this turn of events directly, but it's all in the name of privacy, so it's probably not prudent to expect any changes.
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replyBrittany Vincent posted a new article, Steam's New Privacy Settings Effectively Render SteamSpy, SteamCharts Useless
