Show HN: I scrape Steam data every month and it's yours to download for free

[csmets]

Yeah, there's AI, but I added it because I found it easier to find answers I'm looking for. For the data scientists, you can download the CSV and go crazy. Would love to know what discoveries or learnings can be found from it.

To download the raw scraped data you need to become a paid member but you don't really need it unless you're wanting to finesse a table of data for a particular need. The cost is mostly just an incentive to help me pay the bills for running the website.

The bunch of available CSV files contain large amounts of data which has everything from tags, genres, pricing, wishlists, estimated revenue, etc. It's what the AI is reading from.

Hope you find it useful :-)

[Apreche]

Do you have data that https://steamdb.info/ doesn’t have?

[noirscape]

Steamdb lacks an API for one, and the devs officially have a policy that they'll never make one, saying you should just scrape Steam directly instead of bugging them about it[0].

It means that steamdb, while extraordinarily useful for casual prodding at what's stored on Valve's servers, isn't very good if you want to run data analysis or something like that on the metadata of Steam games at scale.

Not sure if it's legal to charge for the raw scrape when OP doesn't seem to be affiliated with Valve, but that's not up to me to figure out.

[0]: https://steamdb.info/faq/

[m00dy]

If you need to be a paid member to download csv file, then it is not free :) lol

[nickthegreek]

free tier allows you to download the csv.

[xerox13ster]

If you need to make an account and give this guy personal information (a digital commodity like oil) to see the data it's not free lmao

[kmfrk]

I got some answers that weren't specifically about my questions in some instances. As someone who's just trying out the free demo, it's not a big deal, but maybe you can provide a way to flag answers for to redeem their credits? It would probably increase retention and help people chase down bugs.

[ghfhghg]

I guess the main differentiator over steamdb is getting the data in CSV?

Might be good to clarify in the FAQ because the people I know who would pay for this are not the most techy types.

[ddxv]

Hi, I'm interested in scraping steam too. Do you have the scraper code available open source or one you recommend?

[lolinder]

Have you looked over the data that OP is providing here and determined that it doesn't meet your needs?

Generally it's polite to avoid scraping if you can help it, so I'd start by considering whether OP is already providing what you are looking for.

[netruk44]

I wrote a simple scraper for a 'steam game semantic search' app I built a while ago.

It definitely won't fetch all the data that this person does though. It only fetches the current list of games on Steam, their store page information and some reviews for the game.

The code quality probably isn't amazing, but it might give you an idea of how to get started with your own scraper.

https://github.com/Netruk44/steam-embedding-search/blob/main...

[DrammBA]

https://steamdb.info/faq/#how-are-we-getting-this-informatio...

I found this explanation from steamdb that points to the various projects and libraries they use to gather all the data they have. It's not a how-to, but it has very useful info.

[z3c0]

I had to refresh before posting, because I wanted to see if someone else beat me to being that HN commenter but...

From the Terms of Service (emphasis mine):

6. Restrictions on Use

You agree not to:

    Use the Service for any unlawful purpose.

    Attempt to reverse-engineer, modify, or *create derivative works of the Service.*

    Share, resell, or distribute downloadable data provided by the Service without explicit written permission.

Do you intend to delineate the data provided by the service from "the Service" itself? It seems most fair that data received via Fair Use remains in that arena, pun fully intended.

That aside, it's an intriguing dataset nonetheless, but I'd prefer to see a sample of the data before signing up.

[csmets]

Thank you for highlighting this. I've updated the terms to align with the values of this service.

[akudha]

Steamdb.info displays graphs etc. Is that considered a “derivative work”?

I am not sure what is considered derivative work and what isn’t

[JadoJodo]

At a glance, it appears the product is the “chat with the data" feature; The CSV is free.

[stared]

Regarding Steam data, I am curious about how games are being played (hours spent) and, even more, about their co-occurrence (i.e., player X spent both time on game A and game B). I would love to make a visualization like https://p.migdal.pl/tagoverflow/?site=gaming&size=32, but for Steam data.

Also, for deeper insight than sales volumes (e.g., game design, general trends, demographics, types of players), such things would be crucial.

and

[Ksudijaan]

It is not that difficult to scrape Steam data using SteamKit, right? I build a website around Steam data a couple of years ago, with a small scraper app which was hourly scraping new updates (using SteamKit) and putting it into my database.

The biggest advantage that SteamDB has, is that it has a ton of historical data. That is not retrievable from the Steam Network, so the only way to have gotten historical data is to start early.

My website is now defunct for a year, but I've kept the scraper running. I now have 7 years of historical data in my database.

[eamsen]

Can you please provide examples for the raw data? As a user, I would like to know what I'm buying before paying.

[bdd8f1df777b]

It seems to be missing reviews? I have always thought about building my own recommendation engine from steam data, given how steam's own recommendation never works for me.

[aranw]

Nice! It would be nice however to see more detail about the data you collect and what exactly you provide on top of it using AI or through aggregation etc

[somenameforme]

Out of curiosity, what formula did you end up using for reviews:sales? I've looked into this a bunch and it's a very tough problem!

[giancarlostoro]

> Yeah, there's AI, but I added it because I found it easier to find answers I'm looking for. For the data scientists, you can download the CSV and go crazy.

This is kind of the only way I use AI really, to summarize things, and extract details, then review from the raw sources to make sure the LLM isn't misleading me. I find myself using this approach instead of Googling for things since Google crippled their search the last few years, it feels like every year its harder to find things with Google. I miss 2007 Google...

[dewey]

Give Kagi a try, it's basically Google before it went to shit.

[bitbasher]

You use the chat but the credit used isn't updated immediately in the lower left.

[bloomingkales]

Question for OP, or anyone that considered it:

Do you think Steam reviews are coordinated?

[bluefirebrand]

I think for basically any possible online discussion, from Facebook to Hacker News to Steam Reviews, you should always keep in mind that some portion of it is probably astroturfed, to some scale

Anything from a small indie game to a huge AAA title, you can bet that the creators got their friends and family to post some nice reviews early, just to give it that positive bump

[shagie]

> Do you think Steam reviews are coordinated?

Yes. It's not even a question. Steam flags outliers too.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/281990/Stellaris/

It got review bombed starting on Feb 14th because a different game that the company makes (HOI4) released DLC that upset the sensibilities of part of that player base. ( https://old.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/1iqzih8/why_is_s... )

---

There are Steam review bots for discord ( https://www.codecks.io/steam-bot/ ) and that also encourages people who are members of a game's discord to leave a (positive) review.

---

It's a certainty that reviews are coordinated through a number of different means.

[ryanisnan]

I thought this would a stavros post. Thanks for your efforts!

[happyopossum]

> I scrape Steam data every month and it's yours to download for free

Does not line up with

> To download the raw scraped data you need to become a paid member

Sooo, clickbait or just plain dishonest?

[antasvara]

A CSV of this data is free to download per the pricing page, whereas the raw data (not sure what that looks like versus the CSV) requires a paid account.

So I guess it depends if you consider the CSV as fundamentally different from the raw data in a way that makes this clickbait.

[voodooEntity]

ye clickbait first i saw was pricing. this should be deleted (thread)

[thot_experiment]

> To download the raw scraped data you need to become a paid member

If I have to pay to download the data how is it mine to download for free?

[appleaday1]

looking into this thank you.

[endre]

nice