Hold your horses. It’s just us, your friendly neighborhood data suite. You probably found us by monitoring your connection or through a forum or review. Great, this gives us a chance to explain exactly what we do and don’t do.
Short version
For many small- and mid-sized developers it’s hard to stand out on Steam, no matter how great their game is. To get their game in the spotlight, some decide to advertise it. To do this, it’s vital to know what websites, social media or ads work to reach the right players, but Valve/Steam makes this really hard.
This is where we come in! We help developers understand how many new players come from specific sources. Nothing more.
We do
- Register when a specific link leading to the Steam store page is clicked.
- Register when a new player starts that game for the first time.
- Have our fancy algorithm see if it can link first-runs to clicks.
- Provide developers summarized information about how many people started playing the game after clicking a specific link.
- Care about privacy, thus only collect and keep the bare minimum data needed to provide this feature.
We don't
- Collect or store any data about your person, your computer or your Steam account.
- Share click or first-run data with any other company.
- Collect anything at all after the first start of the game.
- Monitor your playing behavior.
- Install anything on your PC.
- Hurt the game's performance.
Slightly longer version
As you may know, there’s a lot of new games coming out on Steam recently. In quieter times it was easier for a developer to stand out, because they had to share the spotlight with less competitors. But that has completely changed. Of course developers work hard to create an awesome game, but sometimes even that isn’t enough to stand out.
So they turn to (paid) advertising, hoping to get the game the attention it deserves, and to make some money. Makes sense, right? Unfortunately Steam and Steam’s developer backend isn’t designed for this… at all. They can surely advertise, but because the store page, game sale and download go through Steam it’s impossible to know what campaign, tweet or website actually succeeds in finding interested players. This is where we come in.
Steam Data Suite does ‘campaign attribution’ in the least intrusive way possible. Let me explain how it works in short.
- When you click a link to the store page of a game using our toolset, we register that click.
- Once some of the ‘clickers’ start the game for the first time, we register that as well. We call that the ‘first-run’.
- Our fancy algorithm is then able to connect the click to the first-run, reporting a successful sale/download through that link back to the developer.
- That’s it.
Neither the click or first-run data is shared with anyone. We don’t collect anything regarding to your steam account, your computer or your person. Nothing personal is stored, nor is the raw data directly accessible to the developer. We also pinky promise to keep it safe.
Privacy is very important, and we probably hate it just as much as you when companies are being dodgy or unethical about it. We believe that the way we created Steam Data Suite is the most minimalist and privacy honoring way to provide this type of feature to developers. The impact is way less than clicking on a mobile ad, using Google or connecting to a public wi-fi, for example.
If you have any questions about this functionality feel free to get in touch through gamer@steamdatasuite.com.
Cheers,
Oscar
Steam Data Suite