SteamSpy May Be Forced To Shutter Following Steam Privacy Change

Valve made several changes to their profile privacy settings on April 10. Some of these changes, namely making user's games libraries private by default,have had immediate and dramatic effects on the broader Steam ecosystem.

Among the victims of this change was SteamSpy, a popular data aggregation site heavily trafficked by both players and developers. The site tracked sales numbers, player activity in each game, and a slew of other statistics.

Valve just made a change to their privacy settings, making games owned by Steam users hidden by default.

Steam Spy relied on this information being visible by default and won't be able to operate anymore.https://t.co/0ejZgRQ6Kd

— Steam Spy (@Steam_Spy) April 11, 2018

While SteamSpy is independently maintained by a man named Sergey Galyonkin, it relies entirely on publicly visible info from Steam itself. Until this update, every user's Steam Library was viewable publicly with the option to hide it. Now, that paradigm has reversed. Users must manually tinker with their privacy settings to allow others to view all the game they have added to their library. The inevitable result of this change is that the vast majority of users will now have private libraries.

Besides the list of games in a user's library, the number of hours logged in each game will also be hidden by default. Valve claims these changes were made following direct feedback from users, but our bet is that most users couldn't care less one way or the other.

Further Reading: New Profile Privacy Settings