Valve Software he said a major change coming to the Steam gaming platform for privacy and data reporting to game developers.
Steam developers have access to aggregates data "for total traffic to pages" that interest them but also for "traffic from external sources".
The reporting changes will be implemented over the coming months and will focus on three key areas:
- Stopping support for Google Analytics.
- Improved data and functionality of Valve's Store & Steam platform traffic report.
- Internal updates to “improve the measurement of wishlist conversions, purchase actions and activations on Steam.
Valve notes that all of the internal tools it will use have been built with player privacy in mind. The platform will continue to protect the personal information of its users.
Steam will no longer support Google Analytics starting July 1, 2023. Valve says that Google's Analytics solution does not align well with its new approach to customer privacy.
Google is changing Analytics from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 in July, which gave Valve one more reason to stop using it, as they don't have to migrate their systems to the new system monitorings.