Steam Spy No Longer Allows Devs To Hide Game Sales Figures

Steam Spy No Longer Allows Devs To Hide Game Sales Figures

Steam Spy owner Sergey Galyonkin finally had it up with the increasing number of delisting requests, he decided not to re-list all previously redacted results and to stop honoring data removal requests altogether.

Steam Spy was launched in April 2015. It uses Steam's public API's to estimate games' sales numbers by statistically polling user profiles. Since then several publishers such as Paradox and Squad asked Galyonkin to remove their games sales estimates. Until now, Galyonkin honored all removal requests in an effort to prove that his tool was not meant to harm any developers.

But now it looks like Galyonkin has received one request too many when Dying Light developer asked to join the censored data club. Instead of complying with the request, he replied with a series of tweets questioning the utility of honoring those requests.

Galyonkin noted that Steam Spy estimates its numbers the same way polls estimate election results. He then reasoned that if having highly publicized box office numbers didn't hurt the movies industry, he should stop censoring his statistical results altogether.

Previously delisted games including Kerbal Space Program and Paradox's Stellaris have already been relisted on Steam Spy.