Despite the prominence of Sergey Galyonkin's service, SteamSpy's death didn't really make giant waves. However, they're there and we'll all soon be feeling them, as Galyonkin claims he's always known Valve will come gunning for his service.
Throughout 2017, Valve has implemented plenty of changes that affected SteamSpy, Galyonkin said. He's always adapted and while can do so again, he says it would compromise accuracy.
Apparently, the changes will hurt indie developers and publishers the most. Any proper surveys require serious kind of dough, which no indie dev can afford.
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Repeating the survey for any given game quickly turns into a spending spree, and Galyonkin is aware of this. "As a big company, like EA-size, you can still do that", he says, but SteamSpy could be used by everyone for mere $30 a month.
Also, any commissioned research will take longer, again a resource that not many game developers can boast. Indeed, he says that while there is still enough data to extrapolate data and analyse trends, it'll be harder and it'll take longer than before.
In the land of the blind, one eyed man is king, and it appears this is what Valve gravitates towards. Galyonkin says that SteamSpy was a transparent tool and that "some publishers were not exactly happy with SteamSpy, but it felt fair for everyone."
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Galyonkin once again pointed out how little data there is in the market. The industry still relies on boxed sales charts and developers publishing for consoles at least get input from Sony and Microsoft. With Valve however, you're on your own, Galyonking says.
In conclusion, he says he'd applaud the changes if they were really made with privacy in mind. However, "they chose to hide played games without hiding other information by default, which makes me wonder why they did that? If you want to comply with GDPR, you have to hide everything - not just games".
In case you didn't know, Galyonkin's second job, this really unimportant thing he does, is director of publishing strategy at Epic Games. So, he's got his anti-Valve mechanism, but what's the rest of the indie market going to do?
