Although a little despondent following the news of Valve's improvements to player privacy through opt-in public profiles rather than opt-out ones, the creator of Steam Spy, Sergey Galyonkin, has said that he may actually be able to get the service working again, although it will be a little different than before.
Valve made major changes to Steam's privacy policy just a few weeks ago and although that enhanced the privacy of its millions of global users, it did mean that services like Steam Spy which rely on the data have effectively ceased to function. Although there is some data still available from those who opt-in, the fact that most wont, means that Steam Spy is left in the lurch. Or at least it seemed like it would.
Galyonkin has another trick up his sleeve: leveraging machine learning and stats from other sources. Although not as accurate as his previous system, in one instance he was able to make a prediction of game sales that was less than five percent off the reality. In more typical scenarios though, he says that there is around a 10 percent margin of error.
His reason for pulling out all of the stops to keep Steam Spy operating as it has done, is because of all the positive feedback he's received from people. A number of different developers have been in touch with him to say that they relied heavily on Steam Spy in order to get the funding they needed, or to develop the types of games that they felt confident would return on their investment.
"There was an indie company from Berlin that managed to secure financing from the government for their niche title because they had the data to prove that this niche is big enough," Galyonkin revealed (via Eurogamer). "Then there was a successful mid-sized publisher that entered the business after it was able to see which games are selling and which don't."
Moving forward he plans to keep on tweaking the algorithm in the hopes that it will become closer to the accuracy of the original Steam Spy tool. It might not ever quite get there, but if it can be of continued use to people, that may be enough.
