🤮🤮🤮
The enshittification of the internet continues. This comes after a whole year of journalists and others sperging out about how steam charts were being weaponized by the chuds. Which I’m sure is just a coincidence!
In it they note SteamDB might finally gain a proper API for people to use, and there’s no plans to put adverts on it.
Cool. 😃
But, they will be looking to commercialise it somehow - as they said, “SteamDB needs to make money”.
Oh… Aaaaaaaand it’s fucked.
Uh oh
RIP
Well shit… i guess it’s time to get as much out of it as possible and start looking for an alternative.
eww
Well, it was good while it lasted.
The theme of this millennium.
The same NexusMods that was bought up by a shady investment agency a while ago?
Yep, and we all knew it was as a good sign when at the initial announcement they didn’t announce who
If NexusMods is anything to go by, SteamDB will soon require an account to use, with strict limits unless you pay for premium access.
Plus they’re going to allow developers to hide whenever they make changes so we can track minor changes anymore
Fuck they’re going to break/API Paywall IsThereAnyDeal aren’t they
And then proceed to leak your username, e-mail and password.
Seems reasonable. Most people make a few requests, and heavy users can pay for the operational costs.
Edit: that’s a lot of downvotes. People would prefer for it to just go offline entirely?
crowdfunding ≢ private throttling
But… Why?
Moneys
💰
you know, couldn’t someone make a sort of decentralized git of game art assets and just have a client fetch the missing assets, dumping them into the steam library when it finds entries that dont have populated metadata? we dont actually need a centralized web page for this
Cuz consolidation is always good for us the consumers/users!
If the choice is between consolidation and the current owner simply abandoning it, I’ll take the lesser of two evils.
I don’t know man. We’ve seen how bad enshitification takes hold once a big corporation takes over. Honestly, in a lot of cases, I would rather have them fade and get forked vs relying on the enshitificated version to amble along, like git hub, source forge, all of the game development studios in the past decade.
This site being bought does nothing to prevent another from being started.
In practice it does. There’s a big, entrenched competitor out there already, so that puts a damper on any motivation. If the site just closed down, that wouldn’t be the case.
Even if SteamDB is gradually enshittified, there will still be that competitor that does a “good enough” job for a lot of people, meaning the bar for a new player to come along is higher.
Why would network externalities not apply here?
They’re a very common and well demonstrated pattern that plays out with this sort of site; e.g. it’s taken almost a decade for many gaming wikis to get off fandom after they were locked in. There’s a finite pool of user attention and contribution that these projects can pull from, and splitting that pool worsens the commons.
There’s also selling it to another party that isn’t a vampiric parasite as an option. I doubt they were the only potential buyer.
What’s special about SteamDB that no real, fully fledged alternatives showed up yet? What would prevent someone from “forking” it?
They’ve been working on collecting data for a long time. They have a lot of established methods and data that a newcomer would have to do the work to replicate.
I’m not aware of anything they do being open source, so you couldn’t just fork it. You’d have to start from scratch.
That’s kinda what I was trying to point to. Yes it is a lot of work to replicate the functionality, but apparently Valve has no intention of “plugging the hole” this data is coming from, and I’m not sure NexusMods would have any ability to torpedo any potential alternatives as they also depend on a third party. So if/when the original enshitifies it would be possible to move on to a new platform.
literally nothing
Is there an alternative to steamdb?
Not comprehensive and at this scale of SteamDB, not that I know of any. I know https://www.steamspy.com/ and https://steamcharts.com/ , but those are not full replacements for SteamDB.
