Report reveals surprising Steam games usage secrets

April 16, 2014

For years, Valve has been an impenetrable fortress when it came to data. Number of sales, amount of hours played, most-played games—all locked up behind a Fort Knox-like wall. Interested parties were forced to rely on the benevolence of developers for info, like when The Stanley Parable sold 100,000 copies in three days.But last night, Ars Technica revealed that Steam's Fort Knox is only so impregnable from the front. Go around to the side, and there's a huge tunnel replete with neon signs that said "Welcome!" and "Come on in!" So they did.Ars Technica custom "Steam Gauge" tool essentially functions like a search engine—it crawls individual profile pages and scrapes info on what games are owned, how long each game has been played, et cetera. The crawler can only cover 0.04 percent of Steam profiles per day, but through the power of statistics and random sampling Steam Gauge's three-day rolling total provides a pretty good look at Steam as a whole service. If you're curious about more of the science behind Steam Gauge, you can read Kyle Orland's incredibly excellent original article. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2144641/ars-technicas-new-steam-gauge-reveals-over-a-third-of-steam-games-never-played-and-much-more.html#tk.rss_all