Steam Spy Tries To Fly Once More After Valve Clipped Its Wings, A Shell Of Its Former Self

Steam Spy was a data analysis platform that provided users with a wealth of information with regards to trends in the PC gaming industry via data from Steam users. Through the platform, developers could find out what gamers were into, which titles were performing best, and which were not. Unfortunately, steam chose to clip Steam Spy’s wings recently and though it tried to fly again, it could no longer reach the skies.

In a new blog post by the platform’s creator, Sergey Galyonkin, he explains that he is bringing Steam Spy back via machine learning. Unfortunately, with the technology being relatively young and the data being insufficient, the results are unlikely to be as accurate as they were before.

“I have the data for around 70 games from different developers, and for 90% of them, the new Steam Spy is within 10% margin of error. But I also saw some crazy outliers, where the difference between the estimates and the real data could be fivefold,” the blog post reads.

As to what this means for the future of Steam Spy, it seems Galyonkin now has a brighter outlook than he did when Valve decided to make changes to the kind of data it makes publicly available. While he does concede that the company could make further changes to skew his data, even more, it seems he has hope now that he can keep providing his services to anyone who needs it.

“I will keep on iterating the new algorithm while slowly bringing back the core functions of Steam Spy,” Galyonkin wrote. “It will take some time and it’s still possible that Valve will make another move to shut down the service, but until that happens, Steam Spy will continue to operate.”

Apparently, the reason for bringing back Steam Spy was due to the number of requests and testimonies that Galyonkin received from developers. Speaking to Kotaku, he reveals that some developers actually managed to get funding for their games using the data from the platform.