It’s one thing for a gaming company to announce a Steam competitor — and believe me, many have—but it’s something else entirely when the developer behind the world’s biggest game does it.
Epic’s upcoming game store seems to have already gotten under Steam’s skin, but even before the announcement yesterday, one Epic employee spent countless long hours picking apart the behemoth piece by piece. As a hobby.
In April, Valve made changes to Steam that bolstered user privacy while hammering a few nails into the coffin of unofficial sales tracking monolith Steam Spy. The service is not 100 per cent dead, but developers have been searching for alternatives. Last month, they found one. Now it’s been shut down, too.
Steam Spy, the PC gaming sales-tracking mainstay loved by some developers and loathed by others, was recently presumed dead by its creator, Sergey Galyonkin, after an update to Steam's privacy defaults. It is now coming back, but it will be different.
In the wake of changes to Steam's default privacy settings yesterday, unofficial data and sales tracking kingpin Steam Spy is doomed. Many developers who relied on it are mourning its passing, but some are saying good riddance.
Amongst the wake of concerns around user data and privacy, Steam announced they would be changing some default privacy settings for all Steam accounts. And while that sounds positive on the surface, there is one unfortunate downside: the change will result in the popular third-party Steam tracker, Steam Spy, becoming completely redundant.
Steam Spy just released a big 2016 data dump, and it's certainly revealing.
The final estimates for Steam sales for 2015 are finally in. And while there are a few games at the top of the lists that won't surprise anyone, it's warm to see some of the other figures scattered throughout the top 10.
