Valve Corporation’s Steam is an incredibly popular digital distribution platform, often reaching several million concurrent users at peak hours, so knowledge about what Steam users are buying, what they play the most, how long they play, and so on would be incredibly helpful to game makers and publishers. Unfortunately, Valve Corp is notoriously tight-lipped when it comes to sales metrics on Steam, but a new site called Steam Spy is taking advantage of the platform to provide all that data and more, free of cost.

Created by Sergey Galyonkin, Steam Spy uses Valve’s Web API to analyze data from millions of public Steam user profiles. These profiles contain all sorts of information about both the users and the games they play, providing insights on what games are popular and what sorts of players make up their audiences.

Counter Strike: Global Offensive, for example, is currently the top game on Steam for the last two weeks with roughly 5.4 million active players, with an average play time of over 18 minutes. Diving further into the Counter Strike data, SteamSpy shows that the game has a disproportionately large Russian audience, second only to the United States and and a catch-all “Other” category.

“You might see missing or wrong information here and there”

While Steam Spy’s data could be incredibly useful for developers and publishers, it is not without its flaws. The site relies on data from public user profiles, so information from users whose profiles are private is not included. It also does not distinguish between games bought on Steam, games bought elsewhere and activated on Steam, or games owned temporarily thanks to Free Weekends or other promotional events.

Galyonkin also explains that the data itself might not be entirely accurate. “This service relies on data provided by Valve and, well, sometimes Valve Web API servers do not work as intended,” he wrote on the Steam Spy website. “So you might see missing or wrong information here and there.”

Also, while Steam has an incredibly large user base, its demographics are skewed toward a specific type of gaming audience that is not necessarily representative of the video game industry as a whole. For example, Steam lacks notable titles from certain publishers who have their own distribution platforms, such as Electronic Arts and Ubisoft, and it also lacks console-exclusive titles like Destiny.

Screenshot via Steam Spy