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Using achievement stats to estimate sales on Steam
- bartervg 8y agoNote the addition to the end of the post, UPDATE (7/4): Looks like valve is rounding numbers on the API now so this method no longer works. I am not the author of the Gamasutra blog, but I have worked on the estimating method. It used Steam's public API [1] and within the last few hours, the effective precision was reduced to 1 decimal. Potentially related, Steam's stated problems with Steamspy [2] 1. GDPR 2. Broad variance of accuracy [1] https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_Web_API#GetPlayerAchievements_.28v0001.29 https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_Web_API#GetPl... [2] https://twitter.com/GamesCodeDogs/status/1012265304771252224 https://twitter.com/GamesCodeDogs/status/1012265304771252224
- KaoruAoiShiho 8y agoDid the blog post ruin the method?
- larsiusprime 8y agoIt was already in public use for several weeks before and developers had tweeted publicly about it. At worst the blog post accelerated the nerfing of the API, but it was inevitable once publicly disclosed.
- hhmc 8y agoIt's unsurprising this was patched out shortly after being made public. Despite the truncated rounding, the technique could probably still be valuable. Sampling multiple points in time, then analyzing the common multiples each time point yields to give a likely range. This requires that the achievement percentages vary with time (which could be a flawed assumption).
- AznHisoka 8y agoWhy would they patch it? In other words why would people knowing the sales number of games hurt them?
- vermilingua 8y ago“Why would it hurt them” and “Why can’t Valve leak potentially sensitive financial details of their partners/clients” are two ways of wording the same question here.
- shoo 8y agoit lets people accurately estimate sales / revenue of businesses, or market demand. that's valuable information that game developers / publishers / steams might not want to share by default without getting something valuable in return.
- AznHisoka 8y agoIsnt Amazon doing a similar thing by showing the Sales rank of a product then? And Twitter recently now lets you see the ads for any company/competitor as well. its not sales figures but its still competitor intelligence.
- dalore 8y agoIn those cases the companies chose to expose that information as it helps sellers and drivers competition amongst the competitors.
- anonnyj 8y agoRandom thought about the accuracy: If you published a game on Steam, you've probably noticed that many owners haven't cleared even "opened up the game" tier achievements.
- pixl97 8y agoI've bought many games on sale and never installed them. Maybe one day I will, maybe I wont. My take is games that never have sales are more likely to be installed and ran.
- GuB-42 8y agoAlso, bundles. I have a dozen of game I have never played, and will probably never play. They were part of a bundle that was cheaper than the individual game(s) I wanted.
- hhmc 8y agoAlso, some games had their achievements added after release (in some cases years). Achievements don't usually get backfilled to my knowledge, so any players with playtime before achievements will be underrepresented.
- larsiusprime 8y agoThis isn't the case, actually. Testing it against known sales data, the "achievers" stat derived by this method was ALWAYS higher than the # of ppl who had downloaded the game, or the # of ppl who had played it for at least 1 minute (these stats are known privately to developers). We don't know exactly how the total "achievers" pool for a game is calculated, but we know it isn't a simple measure of people who had achieved at least one achievement. It's almost certainly some measure of the total population that is able to register achievements, regardless of whether they have registered any. It probably includes something like family sharing accounts, so it doesn't exactly correspond to actual sales directly, but it seems to be roughly in the middle between the "players" and "owners" stats SteamSpy used to report. Sometimes it would overshoot both, but it was never less than "players."
- kelukelugames 8y agoMakes me sad that Valve keeps on trying to kill Steam Spy.
- KaoruAoiShiho 8y agoValve didn't try to kill Steam Spy... GDPR killed steam spy.
- kelukelugames 8y agoThat's not the consensus from game devs at the moment. Perhaps they are wrong.
- KaoruAoiShiho 8y agoSource on consensus?