The Guy Behind Steam Spy Has Been Working On Epic's Store For Years
https://tinyurl.com/y9mf5v54
It’s one thing for a gaming company to announce a Steam competitor—and
believe me, many have—but it’s something else entirely when the developer
behind the world’s biggest game does it. Epic’s upcoming game store seems
to have already gotten under Steam’s skin, but even before the announcement
yesterday, one Epic employee spent countless long hours picking apart the
behemoth piece by piece. As a hobby.
If you follow Steam closely, you’ve probably heard of Sergey Galyonkin.
Since 2015, he’s been running Steam Spy, a site that scrapes
publicly-available data from Steam profiles, analyzes it, and spits out
statistics like approximate game sales, average playtime per game, and
broader genre and tag trends. A change to Steam’s privacy settings put Steam
Spy against the ropes earlier this year, but it’s still bobbing and weaving—
albeit more clumsily—for the time being.
Few people outside of Valve are more intimately familiar with Steam’s inner
workings than Galyonkin. He has always described the Steam data-gathering
mainstay, used by major developers and publishers to take stock of Steam and
justify their games’ existence, as a “side project.” His main gig?
Director of publishing strategy for Epic’s new store, as it turns out. He
announced yesterday that he’s been working on the project for “the past
several years.” It didn’t take long for the “Steam Spy was literally a
Steam spy” jokes to start rolling in.
“I think it’s funny,” Galyonkin said in an email to Kotaku. “It wasn’t
my intention when launching or naming Steam Spy, but in retrospect, it makes
for a great four-years-in-the-making joke.”
There is, according to Galyonkin, no great conspiracy here. He’s always been
interested in data and game distribution, and that led to him both starting
Steam Spy and joining Epic. Steam Spy has, however, taught Galyonkin, and now
Epic, some valuable lessons that are being applied to the new store.
“I’ve learned a lot about how games are tracking [week] over week, how
effective are sales (not as much as people think, exposure is more
important), and more importantly, I got to talk to hundreds of developers to
learn what they want from a digital store and what they like and don’t like
about existing ones,” he said.
He noted that he could’ve done that last part without Steam Spy, but “for a
person as introverted as I am, it’s way easier when other people are talking
to me.”
“That’s why we won’t have forums on Epic Games store and will start with a
ticketing system, so gamers can message devs about their problems instead of
review-bombing them.”
This led to a slew of valuable insights that Galyonkin says directly informed
the Epic store’s feature set. For instance, forums and other social
media-like tools—a cornerstone of Steam—won’t be part of the package.
Galyonkin said that this is because “not a single developer I talked to
wanted forums” and “the toxicity it brings,” preferring to interact with
communities on their own terms on platforms like Reddit and Discord instead.
“That’s why we won’t have forums on Epic Games store and will start with a
ticketing system, so gamers can message devs about their problems instead of
review-bombing them,” said Galyonkin.
Then there’s the issue of clutter, which often makes Steam feel less like a
svelte 2018 video game store and more like a closet so stuffed full of games
that if you tried to pull one out, it’d be like dislodging the wrong block
from a Jenga tower. This is even an issue on individual game pages. Their “
More Like This,” DLC, and bundle sections impact not just users’ ability to
decide whether they want a game, but also developers’ ability to communicate
what they’re up to.
“There was a problem with too many things competing for users’ attention on
a game page and no way of ever reaching users unless a developer had its own
account system set up,” said Galyonkin. “That’s why we’re trying to
minimize the store presence on game pages and we’re adding a global
Twitter-like newsfeed, so developers can update their players about recent
changes to their games and their future titles. And they can have emails of
their players if the players agree to it.”
Steam Spy’s greatest strength, though, has been its ability to pull back the
curtain on sales data and other trends, paving the way for developers to make
games they know people will like (or that nobody else has made before) and,
hopefully, succeed. And while Epic’s store won’t have public-facing Steam
Spy-like functionality built in, providing developers with as much
information as possible is a big priority.
“We’re aiming to provide developers with as much information to make good
decisions as legally possible,” Galyonkin said. “Contractually we can’t
share other companies’ sales data—Steam Spy shows estimates—but we can
share other useful stats, especially in an aggregated format. We use a lot of
data ourselves and want the developers to have the same tools. And the
partners obviously can share their sales information.”
The Epic store will launch with a “very barebone backend dashboard,” he
said, but his hope is that “eventually it will give developers way more
information about their games that Steam Spy ever could.”
As for Steam Spy, it’s not dead, but Steam privacy changes did a heck of a
job of hamstringing it. Galyonkin’s not entirely sure what he’s gonna do
with it yet, but for now, the project continues to move forward, though at a
speed closer to a crawl than a sprint.
“The current algorithm is based on machine learning and is doing OK for tags
and general trends, plus an actual PhD in machine learning is helping me with
the next version,” he said. But, he said, Steam Spy has taken a back seat
recently: “I’ve been so occupied with Epic Games store, I didn’t spend
enough time working on Steam Spy in recent months.”
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這有八卦到，但這篇其實更像是宣傳 Epic Game Store。
總之，Steam Spy的創始人 Sergey Galyonkin 其實是Epic Game Store的總監之一，他也
在那做了好久了。
所以這篇主要就在說他會以Steam那 「SPY」 來的經驗來讓 Epic Game Store 更好。
有興趣可以看看......
不過說真的他一直強調會對開發者更好更好......什麼的，我很想問那對玩家呢！
尤其是他說為了避免玩家評論轟炸開發者，所以 Epic Game Store 不會有論壇和社群，而
是只有投票系統。
但對我來說，我很愛看Steam上玩家的評論和討論耶！