As a public service, and with Galyonkin's permission, we're able to share the Achievement-dervied player numbers he collected in this handy CSV file. Valve Head of Business Development Jan-Peter Ewert said the company is currently working on a "more accurate" way for users and developers to "get data out of Steam," though apparently this kind of Achievement-derived data set wasn't what he had in mind.īefore the Achievement data hole could be plugged, Sergey Galyonkin was able to integrate the method into the machine learning algorithm used for Steam Spy, where the data was briefly displayed on individual game pages earlier in the week. That move comes just months after Valve started protecting individual Steam usage data by default, cutting off the previous estimation method used by Steam Gauge and Steam Spy. Caveatsįurther Reading Valve working on “more accurate” replacement for Steam Spy’s sales dataBy July 4, Valve updated its Steam API to provide much less precision in its Achievement percentages, cutting off this new data source altogether. This process allows for extremely accurate reverse engineering of the denominator representing the total player base for an Achievement percentage.Īs Glaiel points out, for instance, an Achievement earned by 0.012782207690179348 percent of players on his game translates precisely to 8 players out of 62,587 without any rounding necessary (once some vagaries of floating point representation are ironed out).
(This is useful since each game's player count must be a whole number.) With multiple Achievements to check against, it's possible to find a common denominator that works for all the percentages with high reliability.
This added precision means that many Achievement percentages can only be factored into specific whole numbers. In the Steam API, however, the Achievement percentages were, until recently, provided to an extremely precise 16 decimal places. On the Steam web site, that data appears rounded to two decimal places. The new data derivation method, as ably explained in a Medium post from The End Is Nigh developer Tyler Glaiel, centers on the percentage of players who have accomplished developer-defined Achievements associated with many games on the service. While Valve has now closed this inadvertent data leak, Ars can still provide the data it revealed as a historical record of the aggregate popularity of a large portion of the Steam library. Continued abuse of our services will cause your IP address to be blocked indefinitely.A recently discovered hole in Valve's API allowed observers to generate extremely precise and publicly accessible data for the total number of players for thousands of Steam games. Please fill out the CAPTCHA below and then click the button to indicate that you agree to these terms. If you wish to be unblocked, you must agree that you will take immediate steps to rectify this issue. If you do not understand what is causing this behavior, please contact us here. If you promise to stop (by clicking the Agree button below), we'll unblock your connection for now, but we will immediately re-block it if we detect additional bad behavior. Overusing our search engine with a very large number of searches in a very short amount of time.Using a badly configured (or badly written) browser add-on for blocking content.Running a "scraper" or "downloader" program that either does not identify itself or uses fake headers to elude detection.Using a script or add-on that scans GameFAQs for box and screen images (such as an emulator front-end), while overloading our search engine.There is no official GameFAQs app, and we do not support nor have any contact with the makers of these unofficial apps. Continued use of these apps may cause your IP to be blocked indefinitely. This triggers our anti-spambot measures, which are designed to stop automated systems from flooding the site with traffic. Some unofficial phone apps appear to be using GameFAQs as a back-end, but they do not behave like a real web browser does.Using GameFAQs regularly with these browsers can cause temporary and even permanent IP blocks due to these additional requests. If you are using Maxthon or Brave as a browser, or have installed the Ghostery add-on, you should know that these programs send extra traffic to our servers for every page on the site that you browse.The most common causes of this issue are: Your IP address has been temporarily blocked due to a large number of HTTP requests.