Improved Package reporting
- May 26, 2023
- 3:14 pm
By popular demand we’ve improved reporting on package level in Steam Data Suite’s reporting dashboards. This will make it easier to see what exactly your players are buying, drastically improving reporting for more complex products like deluxe editions.
The problem
Before these changes, we used to simplify the sales data from Steamworks to show the sales per game. This gives a cleaner overview of your sales and where they come from compared to reporting per package.
This sometimes left things a bit unclear, if you had a different version of your game under a different package, like a deluxe edition, you were unable to see whether these sales came from the normal version or the deluxe edition.
The solution
We want to keep the dashboards clean and as clear and concise. But we also want to make sure you can check the package specific information when you needed to. Therefore you are now able to expand the rows on the game dashboard page to show you where your sales came from. Just click on the game you want to see more detail about and it will show you information about all its packages.
This required some fundamental changes to execute. For performance reasons we stored aggregated data per game. We also stored data per package, but there is so much information, that the page load times would be way too slow. Initially we wanted to store the data in this simplified format, but to show sales on package-level, we had to change our “per game” solution to a “per package” approach.
We now connect your games through their sales data via the packages. This allows us to retrieve data in more detail, but also ensure our app’s performance wasn’t impacted.
Setting up for special cases
Because a package can contain multiple games, we need to make a choice on what to assign it to, since we don’t want to show incomplete data. By default it will be assigned to the main game if that game is contained in the package, otherwise it will be the first one we encounter.
Sometimes this isn’t what you want, for example in case of season pass products or some In App Purchase type DLC. In that case you can manually overwrite which game each package belong to. You can do this from Setup > Packages.
Here you can select the main game you want to edit the packages for and change where they belong to. This gives you full control over where you want your data to appear and be counted towards.