?

Originally posted by FINGT:

?

For example, random game with 50K players showing on SteamCharts right now, how do we know those numbers aren’t inflated by bots? Is this even legit?

Originally posted by Em Mim:

Ever wonder if game devs could use bots to inflate player counts? How does Steam Team stop this? Does SteamDB analyze data before showing online numbers? Fake stats could trick people into thinking a game’s better than it really is.

Steam counts the stats in a rather straight forward way.

Player launches the game and it's added to the people playing the game. That's it.


If people are using bots they would have to buy the game to each and every one of those Steam account. So not sure what the problem is. Also they wouldn't need bots. They could just launch the game and let it idle there.
But do you have any proof that people are doing this for this exact reason?

Originally posted by Zefar:

Originally posted by Em Mim:

Ever wonder if game devs could use bots to inflate player counts? How does Steam Team stop this? Does SteamDB analyze data before showing online numbers? Fake stats could trick people into thinking a game’s better than it really is.

Steam counts the stats in a rather straight forward way.

Player launches the game and it's added to the people playing the game. That's it.


If people are using bots they would have to buy the game to each and every one of those Steam account. So not sure what the problem is. Also they wouldn't need bots. They could just launch the game and let it idle there.
But do you have any proof that people are doing this for this exact reason?

What if the game dev have a huge amount of free keys and use for bots?

I’m ignoring player counts and Steam reviews now, something feels off. The fix? Every game should have a demo so we can judge for ourselves. Right now, it’s all marketing, and half the data could be fake, the post is more about [can we trust in the steamDB data]

Originally posted by Em Mim:

What if the game dev have a huge amount of free keys and use for bots?

Won't work. Valve are in charge of the keys for this exact reason. This is also stop fake games from sending out several thousand keys to people to give fake reviews or to other key sites.

Now companies can still do this with Steam but they basically have to show what site or who gets it. For instance it could be "We have 100 Youtubers that wants a key and we want to give it to them" and Valve would be fine with that.

It's all about numbers when it comes to developers asking for extra amount of keys for some reason. Lets say your game only sells 500 copies and they want to take out 50 000 keys. That's a red flag for Valve.

Originally posted by Em Mim:

I’m ignoring player counts and Steam reviews now, something feels off. The fix? Every game should have a demo so we can judge for ourselves. Right now, it’s all marketing, and half the data could be fake, the post is more about [can we trust in the steamDB data]

Steam has nearly 40 million active users right now. People have different taste when it comes to games.

SteamDB take information directly from Steam pages so yes you can trust it.

Originally posted by Zefar:

Originally posted by Em Mim:

What if the game dev have a huge amount of free keys and use for bots?

Won't work. Valve are in charge of the keys for this exact reason. This is also stop fake games from sending out several thousand keys to people to give fake reviews or to other key sites.

Now companies can still do this with Steam but they basically have to show what site or who gets it. For instance it could be "We have 100 Youtubers that wants a key and we want to give it to them" and Valve would be fine with that.

It's all about numbers when it comes to developers asking for extra amount of keys for some reason. Lets say your game only sells 500 copies and they want to take out 50 000 keys. That's a red flag for Valve.

Originally posted by Em Mim:

I’m ignoring player counts and Steam reviews now, something feels off. The fix? Every game should have a demo so we can judge for ourselves. Right now, it’s all marketing, and half the data could be fake, the post is more about [can we trust in the steamDB data]

Steam has nearly 40 million active users right now. People have different taste when it comes to games.

SteamDB take information directly from Steam pages so yes you can trust it.

Thanks for the info. I saw some posts about fake data in reviews and SteamDB, so I was wondering if they were onto something.

Originally posted by Em Mim:

Thanks for the info. I saw some posts about fake data in reviews and SteamDB, so I was wondering if they were onto something.

Keep in mind that SteamDB is a 3rd party and not owned or operated by Valve. They scrape Valve's sites for their information, so take what is said on SteamDB with a grain of salt as there is the chance of errors, despite it coming from Steam's pages.

There are much better ways to to determine if a game is good and fun to play than player counts.

Originally posted by Em Mim:

Originally posted by Zefar:

Steam counts the stats in a rather straight forward way.

Player launches the game and it's added to the people playing the game. That's it.


If people are using bots they would have to buy the game to each and every one of those Steam account. So not sure what the problem is. Also they wouldn't need bots. They could just launch the game and let it idle there.
But do you have any proof that people are doing this for this exact reason?

What if the game dev have a huge amount of free keys and use for bots?

Valve already limits key distribution for this exact thing.

Originally posted by Em Mim:

I’m ignoring player counts and Steam reviews now, something feels off. The fix? Every game should have a demo so we can judge for ourselves. Right now, it’s all marketing, and half the data could be fake, the post is more about [can we trust in the steamDB data]

This makes absolutely no sense, you want a demo of a game to determine if you would like it but when it comes to the full game are unable to research the game at all because you are relying on steamdb?

steamdb gets all their data directly from Valve using the steam API

https://steamdb.info/faq/#why-steamdb-s-player-count-peaks-are-higher-than-other-sites

the concurrent player count comes directly from the Steam API, there is no double counting or guesstimations, the number is directly provided by Valve.

Why does it matter at all whether a game has 50 people playing it or 50000, other than as a statistical curiosity?

If a game developer releases a game nobody wants to play and then fakes having a lot of people play it, they're still not going to have anyone want to play their game.

i dont think steam games being top 3 is a coincidence. stolen ideas and bots. welcome to capitalism. and franchising making joke out of sport

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.