Steam's New Privacy Change Broke Steam Spy

It is with a heavy heart that I report the downfall of the popular Steam analytic tool, Steam Spy. Due to a recent change in Steam's privacy settings, the system will no longer be able to parse accurate enough information about the owners of Steam games to be able to continue.

Steam Spy was created by Sergey Galyonkin in 2015. The program gathered information about games on Steam via the publicly available user data, scanning through millions of libraries for the information. With a recent change to Steam's privacy settings, this information is hidden by users by default.

Galyonkin tweeted about how this will change things for him:

Valve just made a change to their privacy settings, making games owned by Steam users hidden by default. Steam Spy relied on this information being visible by default and wont be able to operate anymore. To reiterate its not because of the new privacy settings. Its because Steam just made everyone's gaming library hidden by default (this wasn't in their blog post).

The aforementioned blog post tells Steam users that they can now hide their total play time in a game, as well as who can access your profile information:

"You can now select who can view your profiles game details; which includes the list of games you have purchased or wishlisted, along with achievements and playtime. This setting also controls whether youre seen as in-game and the title of the game you are playing."

Galyonkin has yet to make an official statement about his plans for Steam Spy, but they certainly don't look good.