Valve has gone through with a massive change for user privacy settings on Steam. As such, the changes will end up making several important tools, such as Steam Spy, essentially inoperable. Steam Spy is an integral tool to finding out analytical information about Steam and its various game information tidbits. With the changes Valve has introduced, however, it’s not going to be around anymore — it won’t be able to grab said information by default anymore.
Valve went over the new changes in a blog post on Steam, which include the fact that game libraries are now hidden by default. There’s more information on the profile privacy settings page about what each feature does and what it actually is. The game details section can be limited to show your collection only to friends and keep others from seeing what kind of playtime you put into games even if you decide to share your library.
The public game library data was the crux of Steam Spy’s operation, and such creator Sergey Galyonkin made the announcement via Twitter that, as such, it wouldn’t be able to work anymore without that crucial data. Now we won’t be able to get the same kind of detailed information we were previously able to. While it’s a win for user privacy on Steam, it unfortunately also means an important and helpful tool will no longer be up and running in the future.
