Steam Spy
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Type of site
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Video game sales tracking |
|---|---|
| Owner | Sergey Galyonkin |
| Created by | Sergey Galyonkin |
| Website | www |
| Alexa rank |
 25,326 (September 2016[update]) |
| Launched | April 2015 |
Steam Spy is a website created by Sergey Galyonkin launched in April 2015. The site uses an application programming interface (API) to the Steam software distribution service that is owned by Valve Corporation to estimate the number of sales of software titles offered on the service. Estimates are made based on the API polling user profiles from Steam to determine what software titles (primarily video games) they own and using statistics to estimate overall sales.
Tracking of video game sales is of strong interest to the video game industry, but does not have the robustness of other industries, such as television with the Nielsen ratings system or music with Billboard charts. Though the NPD Group does track retail and digital sales of video games, access to this data requires payment and it does not typically break down distribution of sales on various platforms. Sites like VGChartz have attempted to collect more detailed sales figures based on external data, but there have been reported problems with how this data is aggregated. Valve's Steam client is the largest outlet for digital sales of games for Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux platforms. Normally, sales of video games and other software offered by Steam are kept confidential between Valve and the publishers and developers of the titles; developers and publishers are free to offer these numbers to the public if they desired. Valve does offer statistics on the most bought and played games, but otherwise does not provide any sales figures publicly. Galyonkin noted that whereas the film industry receives funding from financing companies which are more open about sharing their financial results, funding within the video game comes from a variety of non-traditional sources, leading to the market being coy to report on the sales of a game.
The idea for Steam Spy originally came from a similar approach used by Kyle Orland and the website Ars Technica for their "Steam Gauge" feature starting in April 2014. Steam Gauge uses the Steam API to access publicly available user profiles to obtain a list of games that that user owns. At the time of its creation there were over 170 million Steam accounts, making the task of polling the entire list of games impractical. Instead, they opted to poll between 80,000 to 90,000 each day as to collect the game lists, and then used sampling statistics to estimate the total ownership of each game. Ars Technica estimated at its onset that the margin of error was within 0.33%.
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