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ramius3443

Byzantium First. Purple Patriots Are in Control.
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Dec 20, 2012
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I am one of those people who likes to see the raw numbers for games: namely, how many people actually play the game, and on average for how long. For quite awhile I used a site called Steamspy, which essentially catalouges this and other playtime data (number of owners, how many people are buying the game, geographical distribution of playerbase, players playing consecutively ect) for many games (most titles on Steam are there, including all the EA ones), and often use it as my final determinant on whether to buy a game or not (if the data shows most players stop playing after the 3 hour mark....).

It is essentially Steamdb with more numbers.

However, while looking for said player data on Stellaris, in this case so I could see how many players are still playing the game compared to say a month ago, I noticed something odd:

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I thought this was a one off thing, so I tried with every other PDX title: they were all filtered from the search results. I was becoming increasingly suspicious about what this meant when I decided to take a more direct approach: I googled "Eu4 Steamspy". Sure enough, the page appeared as the first link, and I clicked on it.

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At least according to steamspy, Paradox seemed to request it's games be removed from the service. My quesiton is: why is this? Almost every other major developer seems content to allow their games to be included on the site (Ea, Creative Assembly, Activision, Ubisoft, SEGA, Valve, and Bethesda titles can be looked up at will), so why is Paradox blocking the results?

Espessialy since much of the data I can get off of Steamdb anyway, this just seems like nonsense.
 
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I wonder whether it's because they've got a stock market flotation going on and having inaccurate sales figures available isn't good from an investor point of view, the company wants to be in ultimate control of information that can drastically affect the value and attractiveness of the company from the perspective of investors
 
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Paradox thinks the average person is too stupid to read the fine print of steamspy and so they are removing all sales figures so they can give out more "accurate" information - read, information that has been carefully curated to make it look attractive. They've taken all this down, but they aren't releasing their own sales figures, which would presumably be the natural option to correct the problem. The problem with censoring data is it doesn't make people want to go "Yeah I totally understand why you did that, please give me more spoon fed statistics that don't tell the whole story". It makes them think "Wow, why would they hide that information, is it because they think I'm too dumb to read the fine print, or is it because they don't want me to know that nobody plays game X for more than 3 hours because it's trash?"
 
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Maybe it is related to the entry of PI in the market?
 
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I wonder whether it's because they've got a stock market flotation going on and having inaccurate sales figures available isn't good from an investor point of view, the company wants to be in ultimate control of information that can drastically affect the value and attractiveness of the company from the perspective of investors
Ah, sounds about right. I guess it's understandable for the next few days... but it would be nice if a month or so after their stocks settle a bit to let the data back on.


Or alternatively, if they just release some of their juicy inhouse statistics a little more frequently (whose playing what nation/configuration ect) Id be just as happy :)
 
I'm not sure which upsets me the most, Paradox asking Steamspy to withold the data ior Steamspy caving in to the request. I have to say I am shocked. This is not the sort of thing I would have expected from Paradox of all developers. Deeply shocked. I fear this is the beginning of the end of the Paradox I have known and supported all these years. I would certainly like a full explantion for this. I would also like Paradox to reverse this decision.
 
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So, the reason appears to be that inaccuracies with the data started speculation about what sales numbers they actually had, which apparently distracted them from making games. So they prefer to release the data only when they feel it is convenient.

It makes sense, but it's something I would not expect of Paradox. When you have devs active on the forums, this in touch with the fanbase and modding community and all that, it feels out of place if they want data to remain disclosed. They could have advised SteamSpy to add a message "This data is apocryphal and may not be correct" to the numbers, or (even better) put a counter on their own site.
 
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Having listened to Fred's explanation I have no comment on internal Paradox staff matters, that is Paradox's own business in my book.

What I feel is this: censoring the internet is a wholly innapropriate and disproportionate response to an internal company difficulty whatever it might be. And it is clearly censorship since Steamspy simply sample, collate and intepret public information freely available. Steamspy is also an important resource used for many purposes by many people in the gaming community.

I would invite Fred to reeflect on this, find an alterantive and more apropriate way to deal with his problem, and reverse his request to Steamspy.
 
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they could embargo the steamspy data until they release their own sales numbers

but I guess this will not happen because effort