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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这有八卦到，但这篇其实更像是宣传 Epic Game Store。
总之，Steam Spy的创始人 Sergey Galyonkin 其实是Epic Game Store的总监之一，他也
在那做了好久了。
所以这篇主要就在说他会以Steam那 “SPY” 来的经验来让 Epic Game Store 更好。
有兴趣可以看看......
不过说真的他一直强调会对开发者更好更好......什么的，我很想问那对玩家呢！
尤其是他说为了避免玩家评论轰炸开发者，所以 Epic Game Store 不会有论坛和社群，而
是只有投票系统。
但对我来说，我很爱看Steam上玩家的评论和讨论耶！

STEAM上的玩家评论不见得都是无的放矢甚至很多负评是直接戳到游戏的缺点

中国人因为没中文给负评 就看不到理由了 更惨

看来假游戏可以安心上epic了

steam最大的优点就是评论，如果评分能更细化就好了

没有评论机制没兴趣 多数游戏的评论算是满能反映优缺点

没中文负评也成为梗了 STEAM表示有话题

撇开来闹的评语,很多都讲得很实在但是你做的好也是被吹上天阿,玩家评论真的算坏事吗?

习禁评

有些评论写得很精彩或是好笑 反而让你更想买

还是已经是疼讯的形状了

一些游戏会不会对特定人造成不适感，没有评论也不会知道评论虽然有好有坏，但直接禁止也不是好事

没论坛、没得讨论，也不需要用了亏你还是STEAM SPY的藏镜人，结果根本只会抄烂的.....

禁评继承人

买游戏时评论比分数更重要阿

那你也要先有游戏啊所以当然从让开发者过来

民情问题 他们习惯禁评反正先把游戏基数冲上来 不怕没人买 还可以看一下那个卖自己再抄一下