- Hello, YouTube, how you doing?
Danny here, from noclip.
With a special announcement, just for you.
You see, here at noclip,
we just started a Podcast
which is kind of like one of these videos you're watching,
except without the visuals
and if you put a pair of these on,
you can listen to it on the toilet.
So we've done that,
it's available on iTunes and Google Play
and all the various places that Podcasts are sold.
We have an RSS feed up on the website.
All that good stuff.
But we thought, "Oh, what if we put it up here as well?"
So this is kind of a test I guess.
The Podcasts, they're not just a bunch of
people sitting around a table talking
about what games they played that week.
They're kind of like what we do
with our docs here on noclip.
Highly curated, highly edited,
you know, produced stories.
Which we're putting a lot of time and effort
into every single one of these episodes.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Let us know what you think of the Podcast
and also just let us know what you think
about the Podcasts going up on the YouTube channel.
We don't want to flood the channel with stuff
we've been pretty deliberate in that
and making sure that anything that goes up
is something that we're proud of.
I know we wanna make sure we keep that up.
The Podcast will come out probably
once every like, two, three weeks.
It's kind of like whenever we wanna do them, kinda thing.
So it's not like we'll be flooding the channel
with them, either.
But, yeah, what you're about to listen to
or watch is essentially
a video version of what the audio that you listen to
if you just had it on your Podcast feed.
So, enjoy it!
Enjoy the show!
It's all about Sergey Galyonki and Steam Spy.
It's an amazing story,
if you've never heard about any of this stuff.
And we hope you enjoy it
and if you use Steam Spy, it'll certainly be interesting.
But yeah, let us know what you think in the comments below.
And we hope you enjoy the show.
(slow jazz electronic music)
- Hello and welcome to noclip,
the show where we bring you the stories
about the people who play and make video games.
I'm your host, Danny O'Dwyer.
(slow jazz electronic music)
Okay, I'm going to talk about European law
for like 30 seconds.
And I want you to trust me that it'll be
worth your while.
All right, 20 seconds, I swear.
Okay?
All right.
Earlier this month, GDPR or
the General Data Protection Regulation
was introduced to law by the European Union.
Its purpose is to protect people
like you and me from the increasingly intrusive ways
that our personal data is being used against us.
The ramifications are already being felt with websites
and online services around the globe
scrambling to change their privacy policies.
You've probably noticed all the emails
about this in your spam box.
So while all this has been going on, Steam,
the biggest online marketplace for video games,
has introduced a new privacy policy of their own.
Valve, the company who runs Steam,
had previously set it so that every person
who had a Steam account had a list of all the games
that they owned on their public profile.
Sort of like a bookcase showing
all the digital games you've collected.
The new setting made it so that all of this,
the bookcase, the collection,
was automatically set to private.
No big deal, right?
It seems like a pretty sensible change to make.
But sadly this has had a knock-on effect
that has made an incredibly popular and useful data tool
all but useless.
Steam Spy is a website that used this public data
to calculate game sales.
You could type in a game's name and in an instant
see everything from how many copies its sold
to the countries its most popular
and how often those players who own it, play it.
Over the years this service has proved itself invaluable to
people like indie developers trying to market their games,
reddit users trying to learn about the industry,
and games journalists mining for data.
Steam Spy did something that was pretty important,
it opened up a tiny window into an industry
that had always been notoriously secretive about sales.
Perhaps even suspiciously so.
So, why did Valve do it?
Did it have anything to do with GDPR?
And what knock-on effects will it have on the industry?
Welcome to noclip, Episode One,
The Steam Spy.
(jazzy electronic music)
Sergey Galyonki was born in Lugansk in the USSR,
a city located on the border between Ukraine
and Western Russia.
His family moved to Poltovwa,
closer to the center of Ukraine.
And it was here that he played his first video game.
- My godmother, she used to work for
a huge computer center,
you know like a secret type of building,
you know, so you can't get in unless you get a
y'know pass or something.
But because I was a kid,
they would let me in with her.
I was, I don't remember like, seven or eight.
And she let me, she would take me to
you know to her job and she would let me play
with computers.
And they didn't have many games,
it was you know they were mostly to do with statistics
and stuff like that,
but they had Tetris
and they had Kingdom Euphoria.
And back then I totally hated Tetris.
I didn't play it much,
but I mostly played Kingdom Euphoria,
which was a text based strategy game.
- Text based strategies appealed to Sergey.
From a young age he enjoyed solving problems.
He'd spend hours making small games
on a programmable calculator.
You see, the Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s
had restricted access to most type of electronics.
So the computers available to consumers
was limited to Soviet manufactured machines,
or expensive black market imports from the West.
- I didn't play many video games until
like maybe age of nine or ten.
Because we didn't have any.
We had only like you know those old Soviet arcades.
But then the Z Spectrum came to our country
and it was a revelation.
It actually was the first mass computer in Soviet Union.
Not just in Ukraine, in whole Soviet Union.
And I bought the first one,
not I bought it, my father bought it for me.
And I actually assembled the second one myself.
Because you could buy you know the scheme,
you could buy everything, you know separately.
And just solder it.
And it was fairly easy back then
and I saved a bunch of money, do it.
- Using his ZX Spectrum, Sergey would
create games for himself.
He didn't enjoy programming in BASIC,
he found the code too restrictive.
So instead he opted to program using Assembly Language.
His love of programming continued through his teens
and when it was time to go to university,
he chose to study Computer Integrated Systems,
with a focus on Neural Networks.
Ukraine has always been ahead of the curve
when it came to developing algorithms.
For instance, the first Neural Networks
used to detect fake dollar bills
were prototyped in Ukraine.
Sergey continued his education and worked a bunch of jobs.
He did page layouts at a local newspaper,
he spent some time at a game studio,
focusing on edutainment.
Eventually he'd find himself moving to Kiev
and taking up a job at a games distributor
responsible for selling games for
some of the biggest publishers in the world.
What were some of the popular games
in the Ukraine around that time?
Any stand out in particular?
- Well, I mean, it's the usual,
except for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
We were not distributing S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was a different company.
But you thought about S.T.A.L.K.E.R., right?
That was the most popular game in Ukraine
and I guess it's the only,
see a lot of people, I guess playin' it.
From our products I would say
World of Warcraft was the most popular game ever.
I mean, it was selling like hot cakes.
That was just literally crazy.
You know?
We couldn't get enough of it, y'know?
Into stores.
That was unbelievable.
- Was there any games that were very popular in the West,
that just were not popular at all in the Ukraine?
- A lot of like, intellectual properties
that are not familiar to Ukrainians were not selling well.
Like 50 Cents video games that, y'know nobody,
knew about 50 Cent back then in Ukraine.
So didn't really sell well.
Also was an awful game, to be honest.
(laughing)
- Not many copies of Blood on the Sand sold in Kiev?
- Yeah, yeah. (laughing)
- Sergey's greatest love was programming.
He'd continued to code during his spare time.
But there was something about
the distribution business that excited him.
Again, he was problem solving.
Learning how customers made decisions
and using data science to find answers.
Well, that and simply watching people.
- I enjoyed it immensely.
Because you learn a lot about how people
behave and how people consume games,
by just doing a little distribution.
And I sometimes, I would just spend like
half a day in a store, one of our partner stores,
just talking to people
and trying to understand how they behave,
you know how they're looking
and products on the shelves,
how are they buying,
how they're making decisions to buy,
and that helped a lot because,
I mean, I like looking at stats and the numbers,
but unless you talk to people it's sometimes really hard
to understand how they actually think, y'know?
- Sergey would eventually take what he learned
in distribution and bring it back to
the world of development.
He spent two years at Nival Interactive,
creators of the Blitzkrieg series
and the developers of Heroes of Might and Magic V.
He enjoyed the job and life was good.
Sergey was married now, he had children.
But something bubbling under the surface in
Ukrainian society was about to come to the boil.
A few days after Valentines Day in 2014,
the Ukrainian revolution would see rioters
clash with police throughout the capital city.
The tragic shooting of unarmed protestors would lead to
the ousting of Viktor Yanukovych,
the Russian invasion of Crimea,
and the eventual war in Donbass which continues today.
A frozen conflict taking place on an area
half the size of the country.
A proxy war where Russian funded proto-states fight
Ukrainian government forces,
thousands dead on either side.
- I was in Kiev at the time.
My family was still in Lugansk,
so we had to move them out of the war zone.
And, yeah.
But me and my kids and my wife were in Kiev.
- Was it a difficult decision to leave during the war?
- Well, not really.
I mean, when people are shooting outside of your
apartment, it's kinda like a natural decision.
So, yeah, no.
The moment they started shooting, y'know, in my area,
I just packed my family and we left.
A lot of people don't realize how,
how the stuff affects game developers as well.
I mean a friend of mine he was still living in Lugansk
when the war started.
And he would drive to his office
and he would like he would hear bullets
just flying past his car when he would drive to his office.
And it continued for like maybe a week
until he's like I'm crazy.
There's a war going on and I'm going to a job
making video games.
So he left after that.
But I mean, because it happened all of a sudden
and you know you see it in the movies
and you expect it to be like in the movies
but it's not.
It just, y'know, it's a new type of war.
You don't see a lot of tanks just rolling in.
You don't see like, you don't see the front lines.
It just, it's just, people start shooting.
So he left and a lot of people did around the same time.
(ominous music)
- The conflict led to an exodus
of Ukrainian Game Development.
4A Games, developers of the Metro series,
relocated their studio to Malta.
Sergey and his family left for
the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
The reason was simple,
it was the closest country him and his family
could move to without requiring visas.
As it happens it was also one of the 20 or so
global locations that developers Wargaming had offices.
The Belarusian developer responsible for
the wildly popular World of Tanks.
- Yeah, Wargaming is an amazing company.
It's huge and Wargaming is really different from
any other companies I've ever worked for.
And I've worked for Eastern European companies,
not just for the Western companies.
Its culture is really something.
It's a conflict-driven company.
Yes, you're expected to shout at other people
in discussions.
You're expected to disagree.
You know like every time I go to a meeting
with my friends at Epic,
it's usually I agree with you,
I respect your opinion,
but in Wargaming you would start with the but part, y'know?
You would not do any formalities.
You would say well, this idea is incorrect
because this and this and this
and I don't like this because this.
And it really saved a lot of time in discussions,
because people know that everyone respects everyone,
otherwise you would not be working, y'know?
At the company.
If you don't respect other people.
And that let people express opinions
kinda in a more aggressive way.
We're getting also, it's really interesting because,
the core gaming audience,
people that don't usually play video games.
So you look at people that play World of Tanks
or World of Warships,
they are over 40,
most of them have families and kids
and sometimes they have grandchildren, y'know?
And they don't know much about other video games.
And they don't consider World of Tanks or World of Warships
to be video games.
They just consider it to be y'know their hobby.
Like they would consider fishing to be a hobby.
And that is both amazing and really demanding.
Because you know it's a different audience,
gamers are used to certain rules in video games
and gamers are used to change.
And gamers are used to a lot of stuff being taken away.
Like people do not complain when Call of Duty
releases a new game every single year.
You essentially have to re-buy it
and they take away all of your progress,
when you buy the new Call of Duty, right?
- Yeah.
- Well imagine doing that to a bunch of
60s years old people, you know? Every year. (chuckling)
They would probably not like it, right?
On the other hand, you hear a lot about (mumbles)
in online gaming.
And while World of Tanks players are not,
not the most pleasant bunch,
they are way more polite
than your average kids in Call of Duty.
So that, like (mumbles) was never a huge problem
in World of Tanks,
every time people come and talk about
we are free to play game,
you're supposed to have a toxic audience.
Well, not really, I mean if you're 60 years old
you probably know how to behave yourself, right?
(laughing)
- Sergey worked as a Senior Industry Analyst at Wargaming.
Helping the team find in-roads into different markets.
Aside from their core Wargames,
Wargaming published games from other studios
and even worked on experimental games,
under different brands.
Think mobile games about managing a coffee shop.
It was varied work that Sergey found interesting.
In the spring of 2015, like so many others in
the international development community,
Sergey took the annual pilgrimage to
the Gamers Developers Conference in San Francisco.
Here he attended panels, networked with other analysts,
and met old friends.
One panel he attended was presented by Kyle Orland,
a journalist for the technology website Ars Technica.
Kyle had created a program that could pull
user data from Steam and using it
he was able to calculate video game sales.
He called it Steam Gauge.
- I'm Kyle Orland, I'm Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica,
and this is Analyzing the Steam Marketplace,
using publicly derived sales estimates.
Now I've been covering the game business
for a little over a decade
and anyone covering this industry, or following it,
one major annoyance is the lack of reliable
specific data about sales of games.
Now it's not like this in most other entertainment media.
It's just not a problem.
Nielsen, for instance, provides ratings
literally overnight for TV shows
and makes the headline numbers very public
in publications like Variety.
Theaters and studios provide box office estimates
every weekend for movies.
There's billboard charts for music,
there's The New York Times Bestseller list
every week for books,
et cetera, et cetera.
So what do we have for games?
For games we have this.
This is what NPD, a US tracking firm
sends to the media every month.
It's a top 10 list based on
their sampling of US retail outlets
and now electronic sales.
If you pay a lot of money
you can get more details than this.
You can get every game that they track
and actual sales numbers,
but people who get those numbers
are contractually prevented from sharing them publicly.
And NPD is pretty strict about enforcing it.
You get occasional leaks.
- Back in Cyprus a few weeks later,
Sergey was doing market analysis
for Master of Orion: Conquer the Stars.
Wargaming was publishing the game
and Sergey was trying to determine market data
around 4X Strategy Games.
However, his VPN was down
and he didn't have access to any of his data.
It was then that he remembered Kyle's talk.
- Well it was end of March, 2015
I was still working for Wargaming
and the funny story behind Steam Spy
that my VPN was down and the office was closed
for an extended holiday.
And I needed to look up some numbers
and I didn't have access to my data
and I like, well I need this data,
because I have nothing else to do.
And I was just came from GDC
and I remember the presentation by Kyle Orland
from Ars Technica, about Steam Gauge.
And I said well, how hard would it be to recreate that?
And he didn't give any y'know instructions or anything
how to do that, but I mean you have internet
it's fairly easy.
So I spent couple of evenings writing it
and by Monday I had all my data,
I wrote my documents,
required for the office,
so by the end of Sunday and I was like,
I was stuck with essentially Steam Spy.
Without any interface.
And I was like, well maybe I should just add interface
and open that up to everyone.
- Sergey added that interface, gave it a web presence,
and shared it with the folks who listened
to his video games Podcast.
Right away he saw indie developers flooding to it.
This tool, something he was calling Steam Spy,
was democratizing data in a way the PC market
had never seen before.
What Steam Spy was doing was incredibly clever.
The Steam marketplace was the biggest online retailer
for PC game sales and by default user profiles were public.
Sergey's algorithm would poll data
from between 60-70,000 profiles a day
and using that extrapolate total game sales.
It didn't poll every single person on Steam,
but with enough data points his algorithm
could get to within a few percentage points of accuracy.
When NPD produced its top 10 charts,
all that that was highlighting was
which games were the most popular.
But Steam Spy, with its repository of data,
was far more powerful.
For instance, you could look at trends
and see how must more games sold when they went on sale.
Or you could use the data to see
how popular baseball games were in Portugal.
Unlike NPD which just told you a specific thing,
if you had an unanswered question about PC games sales,
Steam Spy could help you get to the answer.
Sergey had developed a tool for market researchers
in the video games industry,
but it seemed everyone wanted to play with it.
It wasn't long before the games press
started posting articles using data
they had gathered from Steam Spy.
Reddit was full of threads about games
that were secretly incredibly popular.
But it wasn't just hobbyists using it.
Indie devs now had access to
a powerful market research tool.
And even large publishers were using Steam Spy.
Were you at all worried that,
I mean you were just using the Steam API, right?
To pull this stuff?
- Yeah, yeah, I was, I checked the rules.
I mean I'm not a lawyer or anything,
but I read the Uler, I actually read it.
And I didn't find y'know that I'm breaking anything.
They changed the Uler after that. (chuckling)
But back when it, I launched it,
I was not breaking any laws.
And I guessed well, I mean,
anyone can estimate anyone's sales, right?
That's why we have a lot of research companies.
And you have super data, you have Usuy, you have NPD.
They all do an estimate and they all the publicize them
y'know, online and it is completely legal.
Anyone is allowed to do that.
As long as you're not stealing someone's,
y'know financial information,
you are allowed to do estimates.
- And you weren't surfacing any individual's
information, were you?
- No, of course not.
No, European laws about user privacy are way more
stricter than American laws about user privacy.
So all information from the beginning was
already itemized.
I was never storing anything that is,
can be used to identify a user.
Well, but coincidentally, it was mostly
y'know gaming journalists,
small indie developers,
gamists, y'know, game enthusiasts,
trying to understand how the market works.
I was, after started adding more and more professional
tools, into Steam Spy,
like Cross Audience research,
playtime distribution,
and stuff that I felt is useful to me.
And I've seen that the audience has shifted
towards more professionals.
And it's been, it's been interesting talking to
people that actually use Steam Spy,
at different conferences.
Intel uses Steam Spy.
Tencent uses Steam Spy.
Electronic Arts uses Steam Spy.
Ubisoft, Activision, you name it,
I don't know a single gaming company that
does not use Steam Spy right now.
It became a tool that a lot of people
in the gaming industry use,
because it's not great, but it's good enough.
And if you look into any other tools available,
you know like SuperData Arcade is an amazing tool.
App Annie is an amazing tool.
But the precision is actually way worse
than Steam Spy's precision.
And accuracy is way worse than Steam Spy's accuracy.
And people still use it,
because having information that might be 50% off
is still better than having no information.
- One of the things that Steam Spy did great
was validating the market.
For instance you could use the tool to see
if fans of a certain genre
bought lots of games in that genre.
So, for instance Sergey found that MoBA players
rarely played more than one MoBA.
So during the height of DoTA2's popularity,
when every developer under the sun was trying to make
the next big MoBA,
they were trying to sell to an audience
that largely didn't want one.
- On the other hand, you look at Survival Games,
like DayZ and you see that people that enjoy survival games
actually buy a lot of survival games.
And that you know that makes it safe to launch
a new survival game, like Conan Exiles for example.
Y'know you look at the market,
you realize well people will buy your game
and you make leap of faith.
People looking into trends obviously
and it's harder to do with Steam Spy unfortunately,
I'm using different tools myself, when looking for trends,
but Steam Spy is decent at this.
So you could look into what's growing y'know
how games are changing what people are playing now
verus what people were playing last year.
If you look into audience for playing on battle grounds,
you'll see that while some of them are coming from
(mumbles) so that's good,
a lot of them are, haven't never played anything before.
So they are newcomers to the genre
and it means that a lot of them will not leave the game
because that's the only game they ever played
or played in recent years.
And that makes it really hard to compete with
(mumbles) and Fortnite on the market,
unless you're willing to do something radically different.
And that's why I believe it's, a lot of innovation
is gonna come from, y'know.
People doing Battle Royale but in an unexpected way.
- I'm European.
I grew up in Ireland, I lived in London for a few years,
eventually found myself in California
and now live in the woods on the East Coast.
And one of the things I've enjoyed throughout my life,
moving from country to country,
is understanding the preferences of different people
in different parts of the world.
As it turns out,
Steam Spy is really good at highlighting the types of games
that certain countries like.
I asked Sergey, what were some of the most interesting
geographical trends that he came across.
- Well my favorite part is the German admiration of
anything that has similation in it.
Like the farming simulator,
anything that has to do with simulation, really.
They will play it.
Farming simulator is a phenomenon.
And it was developed in Switzerland,
but is mostly played in Germany.
And you talk to anyone in America
and the fact that they have a trolleybus simulator
they have a trash garbage trash simulator.
And people buy it and people play it
and that's just crazy,
but that's, that's how people in Germany particularly
like to spend their time, y'know.
Japan, back then was obsessed with zombies.
Anything with zombies would sell really well in Japan.
- Was there any stuff that was very popular
in America that just was not popular in Europe
or vice versa that you kind of saw?
- Well America is such a huge market
and when Steam Spy started,
was still the biggest gaming market in the world.
So everything that is popular in America
was pretty much. - Right.
- Popular everywhere else.
So they have a,
well back then they used to like
royalgames and open world games.
Not as much, like French people do not enjoy
open world games as much as Americans.
But French video gaming companies like PBSoft
it's selling games they make recently, right?
They only make y'know open world games.
- Steam Spy was cracking open the sales data
of thousands of games.
As somebody who worked in the games press,
I couldn't imagine this was something
that publishers were particularly happy about.
The gaming audience is savvy.
It cares about consumer rights
and it's quick to react when publishers do things
that take advantage of them.
Steam publishes some data themselves,
like concurrent live players.
But the amount of data that Steam Spy was surfacing
was on a whole other level.
I had to imagine that publishers
must have been lobbying Valve
to do something to lock out Steam Spy.
I asked Sergey if he had ever talked to Valve
during any of this.
I just wanted to know,
what did they think of it all?
- I used to, when I worked at Nivall,
I used to work with them,
because we published games on Steam
and when worked at Wargaming, - Right.
- We also published some games on Steam.
And they used to reply fairly quickly.
But every time I would mention,
well I would not write from my corporate email,
of course I would write from a personal email,
every time I would write about Steam Spy,
they would just shut down.
They would, I mean it would just literally,
shut up and not reply to any of my emails
or any of my communications.
And I have couple of friends working there,
not on Steam, on the Dotter team
and it's the same situation.
Every time we discuss something,
you know like, gaming related or something like that
launch plans or something like that,
they talk, anytime I mention Steam Spy,
they just shut up.
I guess it might be an uncomfortable topic for them.
- Why do you think that is?
- Well, I feel like Valve is a company that
has no leadership.
It has no management structure.
So there's no one to make a decision.
And they only make a decision when everyone agrees
to that decision,
or everyone on a team agrees to that decision.
And there is no consensus about Steam Spy, I guess.
And no one is senior enough,
like in any other company you would have a
head of whatever, head of Steam,
come up and say, well that's my decision,
we'll shut it down or we will let it go
and everybody will, okay!
I might disagree with that, but I will, y'know.
I can live with that.
Any time they make any decision,
you will sit and wonder why did they make this decision?
Every time they make something new,
it feels like a compromise.
Y'know what I mean?
It doesn't feel like they are making any bold,
unusual decisions and it's, to me it has been a
probably the biggest disadvantage in the last several years,
because they stopped experimenting,
they stopped doing something really unusual or bold.
Like I mean the trading card game in 2018, really?
(laughing)
- It's difficult to measure the effect that Steam Spy
was having on the games industry.
He heard anecdotally about games that were funded
through market research derived from Steam Spy.
He saw publishers like SEGA bring many of their
classic games to PC once they saw
there was market for them on Steam.
But one of the big trends that Sergey noticed
was how his tool allowed indie developers to more accurately
price their games.
- I feel especially if you're a young developer
it's really hard to put a price tag on your game.
You always feel like you haven't made everything
you wanted to.
You haven't achieved everything you wanted to
with this title.
So if you're releasing your first game
and you feel like well, maybe I should just
price it 9.99 because that's a no brainer.
But actually your game is worth maybe,
y'know 29.99, because if you look at the last games
at that price points when they were released
they were priced higher, so maybe you should
price your games higher.
Maybe your game is unique and it has no competition
and it has no comparison points.
And if it has no comparison points,
maybe you should price it higher,
because it's something unique that people are willing
to pay more money for.
People are trained to expect triple A quality
from $60 titles
and for $50 titles even,
but you go below 50, you go to 40 to 30,
and people expect it to be an indie game,
maybe rougher on the edges, y'know,
maybe y'know, better graphics than y'know,
$5 game, but they expect it to be an indie title.
They are willing to forgive a lot of quirks
if the title is actually fun.
This is the biggest fear of any game developer I believe.
You're making something, you're sitting in a
pretty much in a dark room,
talking to no one but other fellow developers,
from the same company
and you always think well,
maybe I'm not relevant anymore.
Maybe people don't want to play city simulators
and I've just spent four years of my life
developing one.
Maybe people want something to play something different.
And maybe I should just under price it
and put it for 9.99
and hope that well, maybe if I don't make a lot of money
at least people will play it, y'know?
- Steam Spy ran for three years,
helping indie devs price their games,
helping large publishers do market research,
helping journalists find sales figures,
helping redditors prove their point.
That was until a few weeks ago,
when Valve flipped a switch.
(switch clicking sound)
(ominous music)
On April 10, 2018 Valve pushed an Update to every user's
Profile Privacy Settings Page.
Up until now if you created an account,
your game ownership data was public by default.
People could set this to private, but most didn't bother.
Steam's update flipped this entirely.
Not only would new accounts be automatically set to private,
but it switched every account on the system to private, too.
Without this data Steam Spy could not work.
And Sergey quickly announced that the service was dead.
(ominous music)
At the time the update went live,
the EU had just pushed through
a new regulation on data security.
GDPR or The General Data Protection Regulation
was created to add new protections to user's personal data.
As soon as it came through,
online services around the world
were changing their End User License Agreements
to be in line with the law.
Some services were having to push updates to get in line.
One game, Monday Night Combat,
would eventually have to shut down,
as making the required changes to their backend
would cost more than the game was bringing in.
Everyone assumed that this was just Steam doing the same,
falling in line.
But after a few days,
Sergey realized it had nothing to do with it.
- Well it's not really related to GDPR,
the latest change was not related to GDPR,
because GDPR requires companies to do a bunch of changes
to appoint a person responsible for
User Privacy to change default settings,
to change privacy settings,
for underage people, under 18,
and Valve did nothing.
Like that.
Valve still displays your friend list,
your achievements,
your groups,
your screenshots,
are publicly on your page.
The only thing they hid were games.
And GDPR actually does not require that.
GDPR requires to hide everything else,
that is still displayed.
I don't believe it was linked to GDPR at all.
I thought that it was like that when
they made the change.
But after looking into it,
I don't think it was related to GDPR.
- So if that's the case,
then it must have been related to
what you were doing, right,
because is there anything else that's happening,
that people are pulling from game data?
- Well, I don't know, I mean,
it's on one hand it's nice to think that
Steam Spy was so disruptive they decided to shut it down.
But it's really easy for them to shut it down.
They just have to drop an email to me
and I will stop it.
I guess, bunch of companies are doing similar stuff
to what Steam Spy does.
Only keeping it to themselves.
Or I've heard of other companies that charges
like a thousand bucks per month for accessing the service
that does this, similar to Steam Spy.
Has a little bit more options,
but mostly similar.
And maybe they were unhappy about those guys
and the only way they saw to shut it down
was just shut it down completely,
so no one could use it.
I guess that's, that's one way to do it.
But yesterday they shut, well they didn't shut down,
but they made some changes,
rendering the Store API useless as well.
And the Store API is the API that provides information
about the game price, game developer, like the basic stuff.
Like genre and so on and a lot of sites were using that
and it's now unavailable to them and I mean,
what they did, they improved the store's privacy, or what?
It just feels really odd to me.
- Without access to games lists
and with the Store API changes,
Steam Spy was unable to poll the data it required.
This was a seemingly insurmountable problem,
but Sergey, Sergey likes to solve problems.
And in this case he used machines
to solve the problem for him.
(robotic beeping)
- I no longer rely on information provided by
an APT at all, I use a bunch of other parameters.
As it happens I have an unfinished PhD in machine learning
and topic my thesis was using unrelated,
using loosely related information
to predict economical outcomes.
And that's what I'm pretty much using
for the new algorithm of Steam Spy.
My algorithm that I developed
when I was still thinking about taking a science pass.
And it works more or less.
- And this is probably like maybe it's a stupid question
to ask because it's incredibly complex,
but what is the machine learning doing
to try and figure this out,
if it's not pulling from statistics
or from data and creating statistics out of it,
how are you coming to these numbers?
- Well, the thing is that,
it is kind of hard to explain.
It takes a really huge sample of data
like I would say, maybe 15 million data points,
and it goes through processing
trying to filter out the data
that is proven to be irrelevant
and trying to amplify the data that is
more or less relevant.
Then it feeds it into a Neural network.
And that Neural network does its magic.
And the problem with Neural networks is,
Neural networks tend to over feed.
Neural networks are great for recognizing images,
but are really bad for predicting outcomes
that are outside of what they are recognizing.
So, if you feed an image of a man to a Neural network
and say, it's a man and you also feed an image
of a dog to a Neural and say, it's a dog,
Neural network will be able to
distinguish between this man and this dog,
but it's going to be really hard
for the Neural network to,
if it sees a woman.
It will not understand if it's a,
y'know if it's a man or a dog,
because it does not fit into any of those categories.
And in case of our Steam Spy,
we're trying to predict well the game is,
the Game A has 10,000 owners,
the Game B has 20,000 owners,
Game C doesn't have 10, doesn't have 20,
it might have 30, it might have 40,
please do an, predict that
and Neural networks are really, really bad at it.
But that was my PhD, testing this.
Is preparing the data in a way that lets
Neural networks actually work with this type of tasks.
And it works more or less.
It's not perfect, I'm not, I'm still not happy with it,
but it is, it works.
Yeah, based off of what I've heard from developers
and I have a sample of maybe 100 games,
y'know that provided me with actual data,
it seems that for most of them,
for maybe 95% of them,
that used Steam Spy, it was within 10%.
Give or take.
So actually pretty good.
For some of them, it is violently inaccurate.
The last 5% I mean I've heard about a game
that was the difference was 15 times.
That was just staggering to me.
But for everything else it seems to work.
- Steam Spy started while Sergey was working for Wargaming
in Cyprus,
but during the intervening years
he moved around quite a bit.
In early 2016, him and his family swapped Nicosia
for Berlin as he became the Head of Publishing
for Eastern Europe for an American company
in the online shooter space.
This company was responsible for some of
the biggest shooters in the early 2000s,
but they were struggling to find audiences
for their suite of online games.
One of those games was a third person MoBA called Paragon
that would eventually shut down.
Another was a remake of their classic arena shooter,
perhaps you've heard of it, Unreal Tournament.
And the third was a survivalcraft game
that had been in development for the best part of a decade.
It had sold well on launch,
but the game was designed to be very malleable.
With Sergey and Steam Spy's help,
the team looked at the market research data
and decided to take a swing at putting in a
Battle Royale-style game mode.
Seeing as Sergey was working
with the headquarters in America so much,
he would eventually move him and his family
to North Carolina,
to become Director of Publishing Strategy.
The American company was of course, Epic.
And the game was Fortnite.
- Yeah, I was part of the team.
I was part of making the decision
and obviously we were looking at Steam Spy data
to see how the genre is evolving.
And with talking about Fortnite,
original of the Wolf Fortnite,
that's the reason I joined Epic.
I visited Epic several years ago,
they showed me Fortnite and I was blown away.
I mean, that was a game that you could make
into anything.
It is so flexible,
it is, I mean, well it didn't have Battle Royale mode,
but it had several PBB modes back then.
Experimental PBB modes
and people you saw 50-versus-50, right?
It is actually, well the idea for them all.
You know, two teams building castles and fighting
each other, was actually back then,
in the original Fortnite.
Obviously not 50-50, versus, smaller teams.
But still.
And Fortnite to me felt like a,
y'know like a mold,
you could make it into anything.
- And I mean even when you talk about Fortnite,
it's like we don't know 'cause it's on the Epic,
Epic launch, right?
So we don't know how many people are playing Fortnite,
we don't know how many people are playing World of Tanks,
actually now that you mention it, either.
So your games have been surprisingly hidden behind this.
- Well, I'd have to,
I mean have access to all the data,
but somebody else could.
Both of them have APIs that you can access.
For World of Tanks,
there's bunch of services,
statistics services for World of Tanks.
And there are several services
for Fornite statistics, as well.
So you can see the numbers.
Actually, it's just Epic is a company that
doesn't like to brag about numbers
and when we publish numbers we,
we've felt some pushback from,
y'know from the gaming audience,
because they felt like, well,
we just were viewing them, gamers, as numbers not as people.
And we are really sensitive about that.
I mean we're trying, we're always trying
to do the right by the gaming audience.
So we decided to do it less.
It not completely stop it, but just do it less often.
After I was, I decided, I actually decided
to shut Steam Spy down after all those changes,
because I didn't feel like continuing.
We also had a huge outage at Fortnite at work
and I felt like, well I don't have enough time to,
y'know do my day job.
I also like to sleep sometimes.
This didn't leave a lot of time for Steam Spy,
but I thought I've received maybe,
200 emails from people using Steam Spy,
asking for me to continue
and I felt like, well I mean,
yes it makes sense to do so, y'know,
people really like it.
And that's when I heard all those amazing stories about
y'know peoples, companies starting a publishing business
because they now were able to see the statistics for
game that offered for publishing company
getting small indie company from barely getting financing
from the German government,
because they were able to prove that well,
the game (mumbles) that they were trying to make
is gonna sell.
And it did.
It was really good.
So I felt well, it provides a lot of fire to the market
and I like that.
And I'm not doing it for money or anything,
I mean, at my current day job,
I am well provided for.
It's not that.
It's, it's, the fact that I believe that
informational asymmetry, asymmetry of information
is unethical, in any business transaction.
And Steam Spy is designed to remove informational
asymmetry from business transactions
or from any discussions.
The gaming publisher, the big gaming publisher,
have access to more information
than a small gaming publisher
or a small developer.
Then if you're trying to sign a contract
with a small developer,
you can abuse your power.
You have access to more information to get a better deal.
That is not gonna be beneficial to the developer.
And we've heard these stories about that so many times,
y'know even before Steam Spy,
like publishers abusing power or big developers
abusing small developers.
And having this removed actually helps the market whole.
- And do you feel like you're doing a service
to the world of video games?
- I feel like I'm doing more good than harm.
In this case, yeah.
(upbeat music)
- My sincere thanks to Sergey
for talking to us this week.
You can learn more about Steam Spy
and look up all your favorite games
by visiting SteamSpy.com.
You can also throw Sergey a few bucks a month
for his efforts, by heading over to Patreon.com/SteamSpy.
Thanks for listening to this first episode of noclip.
We hope you enjoyed our first story.
If you have any feedback or tips you can hit me up
on Twitter @dannyodwyer.
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We'll be back with Episode Two in just a few weeks
and we'll be focusing on a game.
One of my favorite games, in fact.
A game from my childhood.
And the creative team who left Lionhead
to make its spiritual successor.
Whatever happened to Theme Hospital?
Find out in our next show.
Thanks again, see you then.
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