Valve's Steam gaming platform gives developers and publishers access to millions of PC gamers around the world, and the amount of traffic data to process and digest is immense. It helps studios identify the way fans interact with their game and whether their marketing strategies are pulling in the numbers expected. That's why Steam updated how the platform produces its traffic reports, with the sole purpose of giving developers better data and visibility of the impressions of their games listed on the store.
Steam improved their categorization considerably, in several areas. Age Gates, which warns users of potentially age-restricted content, previously showed data classified into "Age Check" or "(other pages)." Starting from May 1, instead of aggregating all the outside sources under "other pages," it will display the original source the user came from to the Age Check screen.
In addition to that, two new categories were added under Steam Platform Traffic, specifically, the game's library details page, Steam friends list, and links shared in Steam Chat. All of these prior to May 1st were displayed under "Steam Client." This will give developers a better overview of how many times a link of their game's page has been shared among a Steam user's friends.
As for Discovery Queue, every time a game is accessed through the Discovery Queue, its data previously was spread out into several categories, including "Other Product Pages," "Home Page," "Your Discovery Queue Page," and others. Now, all of this data from the aforementioned category is getting aggregated under Discovery Queue for better representation. There were miscellaneous improvements to the data reported, including the "More Like This" section and more. Steam warned some developers from seeing a drop in their page views, but that's mostly because of implemented bug fixes, addressing bot traffic, and how titles were displayed when you went into "Games in a Franchise" tab.
For a detailed rundown of the features and changes made to system, you can check out the blog post.
Do you think this improvement in data and traffic reporting will help developers and publishers better understand their players and targeted market? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section down below.
