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.
Yes it’s fucked because running servers costs a lot of money and SteamDB runs on donations. So I hope you did donate at some point when you used their services and disapprove of this development.
Being financial able to contribute is required to validate an opinion. Just like only the wealthy should vote.
Well if the opinion is „they shouldn’t be bought to sustain themselves financially“, yes.
Right, did you look up if they sold because of financial hardship? Pretty sure everything I’ve read has been about its owner personally suffering burnout and disillusionment with the current tech and internet landscape.
Does my life time membership to nexus mods mean I also get life time membership to steam DB now? If not then fuck off nexus mods you sack of dog shit. I already regret how shitty you turned your site into don’t do it twice.
If it does then my point still stands but I will also take advantage of this.
Great. Can’t wait to have to pay to use that site.
Oh god please no ! Noooo !
If NexusMods is anything to go by, SteamDB will soon require an account to use, with strict limits unless you pay for premium access.
And then proceed to leak your username, e-mail and password.
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
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?
Yes. I personally would rather see a project shutdown rather than see the zombie, enshitified version live forever.
crowdfunding ≢ private throttling
is it bad or very bad or fucking bad?
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.
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
Well, it was good while it lasted.
The theme of this millennium.
RIP
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.
But… Why?
Moneys
💰
🤮🤮🤮
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!
eww
Before reading their statements, I would have thought that either Microsoft or Valve themselves could have purchased SteamDB. Especially Valve, so that many of these early leaked data could be prevented if controlled correctly. I think better quotes that explain why this is done are:
As you all know, mods are often built around a particular version of a game, so when there’s an update for it, your game that was perfectly modded and working the day before now just…doesn’t. SteamDB already tracks an incredible amount of information about game builds, depots, manifests, files, and update history across Steam, including years of historical data. Being able to connect that information with modding tools and mod metadata opens up some really interesting possibilities for making modding more reliable.
Over time, we want to explore how a mod manager could better understand which version of the game you’re running, whether mods you’re installing were built for it, and whether an incoming game update is likely to cause issues. It could also make it possible for Collections and other mod lists to better specify the exact version of a game they were built for, rather than relying on someone finding that information buried in a description, comment, or forum post.
After these explanations, it makes perfect sense to me now. Also the next paragraphs, the way this is layed out, suggest change could come in the future once both services are merged or operate tightly together. Notice the wording “for now” and “currently”. There is not promise it won’t change:
What happens now? Well, for now, SteamDB carries on as normal whilst we work with xPaw on the transition and start putting the team and resources it needs into it. Everything currently available for free will remain free
