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A new tool that will scrape Steam for data and provide analysis is in the offing. GameDataCrunch (likely never to be called GDC for obvious reasons) is the brainchild of Lars “Sweet Leaf” Doucet and could a new alternative insight into Steam for developers and publishers.
It’s creator is a former Valve contractor (thanks to Simon Carless for the nod on this one). Though he notes “There won’t be any secret sauce from my time working at Valve, I’ll just be relying on totally public information.”
In describing his approach Doucet said it was “Less trees, more forest. Trying to avoid some of the pitfalls I’m seen in other approaches and spending a LOT of energy listening to the needs of developers, publishers, curators, and others directly involved in this business.”
“A big philosophy of GameDataCrunch is that we try to avoid guesstimates, estimates, extrapolations, and composite figures, and would rather put forth actual facts that we can be confident about.
“We don’t show a “Boxleiter score.” We don’t try to pin down how many copies it sold or how much $ we think it earned. We just collect every metric we know correlates to performance and show them all to you… I’ll also be (eventually) connecting all the major store catalogs together and collecting whatever metrics and signals I can out of public information. So you can see a game’s full story with all the context in one place.”
That sounds like a more useful and honest approach, which is targeted more at developers who have their own data they want to compare with others to make the best predictions or to tweak their approach, as opposed to simply producing sales figures for the media to parrott.
“Publishers and PR agencies have told me that some of the views I’m working on here can take them hours of manual work to generate for a single title. I’ll make it possible in a few clicks.”
“It’s still a little too early to release publicly,” said Docuet “but I will release the MVP next week. If you want to get a hands on preview, though, tune in to this week’s Clark tank…” Which we’ve pasted in below for you. And you can support the project via Patreon.
