
Using achievement stats to estimate sales on Steam - jsnell
https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/TylerGlaiel/20180629/321095/Using_achievement_stats_to_estimate_sales_onsteam.php
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bartervg
Note 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#GetPl...](https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_Web_API#GetPlayerAchievements_.28v0001.29)
[2]
[https://twitter.com/GamesCodeDogs/status/1012265304771252224](https://twitter.com/GamesCodeDogs/status/1012265304771252224)

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KaoruAoiShiho
Did the blog post ruin the method?

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larsiusprime
It 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.

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hhmc
It'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).

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AznHisoka
Why would they patch it? In other words why would people knowing the sales
number of games hurt them?

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shoo
it 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.

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AznHisoka
Isnt 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.

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dalore
In those cases the companies chose to expose that information as it helps
sellers and drivers competition amongst the competitors.

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AznHisoka
How do I then remove my Sales rank from being being displayed? I sell a few
products there and I never chose to expose that rank to anyone.

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ikeboy
Switch to a category that doesn't have ranks, rare but some products don't
have it.

If you're one of the top 10k products within a main category Amazon will
release it in their public data anyway though.

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anonnyj
Random 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.

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AdmiralAsshat
Yep. I even wonder if Steam has some kind of counter that would show me
"Number of games you own that you've never played." I would probably be
horrified.

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Deimorz
SteamDB's calculator can tell you that:
[https://steamdb.info/calculator/](https://steamdb.info/calculator/)

It splits out a chart showing you how many games you have in a few different
playtime categories ("12 or more hours", "6 to 12 hours", "Never played",
etc.)

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kelukelugames
Makes me sad that Valve keeps on trying to kill Steam Spy.

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KaoruAoiShiho
Valve didn't try to kill Steam Spy... GDPR killed steam spy.

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kelukelugames
That's not the consensus from game devs at the moment. Perhaps they are wrong.

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KaoruAoiShiho
Source on consensus?

