Steam Update Privacy Settings, Kills Steam Spy In The Process

Steam Spy is the popular analytics service that has been providing gamers and video game developers alike information that has allowed them to make decisions with regards to certain trends within the PC Gaming community via Steam. Thanks to a recent privacy update by the digital distribution platform, Steam Spy is no longer able to operate as it was able to.

The service was created by Sergey Galyonkin back in 2015 and it worked by essentially accessing the gaming libraries of millions of players on Steam to find certain patterns and details to share with the public. In a Tweet, he explained that Steam has recently made all of its consumers’ libraries private by default, which essentially cut off Steam Spy’s information supply stream.

“Valve just made a change to their privacy settings, making games owned by Steam users hidden by default,” the Tweet reads. “Steam Spy relied on this information being visible by default and won't be able to operate anymore. To reiterate — it’s not because of the new privacy settings. It’s because Steam just made everyone’s gaming library hidden by default (this wasn’t in their blog post).”

Galyonkin also provided an emailed statement to Polygon with regards to the current situation of Steam Spy, noting that he could still technically extrapolate some data based on the information that is publicly available. Unfortunately, the results won’t be anywhere near as accurate as the would need to be.

“Right now, Steam Spy can’t operate using the previous approach,” the email reads. “It’s still possible to extrapolate information based on what is publicly available, but the margin of error is going to be huge. I haven’t decided if I want to change the algorithm, but if I do, I probably won’t expose the new version to the general public, as the new margin of error will be too big for an average user to comprehend.”