SteamSpy used to be a popular service that people used to track game sales on Steam, and it helped consumers see through sales-talk from developers that claimed they had a huge success on their hands, allowing consumers to find real information and make informed purchases. It was, for example, by using the service that fans quickly discovered that the likes of Battleborn and Lawbreakers where doing much worse than expected.
As previously reported, Valve changed things up recently because of GDPR and, since then, Steamspy hasn't been working properly and nothing could be done about it as it's a third-party site. Now Valve says that it is planning to come back with a similar but improved service, although it likely won't be available for regular consumers.
It was during a developer event called White Night in St. Petersburg (in Russia) that Valve's Jan-Peter Ewert said that the company is replacing Steamspy with something "more accurate", as well as confirming that this was because of a "lack of compliance with GDPR". As for the old system, Ewert mentioned that while "it was very accurate for some games, it was very inaccurate for a few others."
While it would be sad to withhold this information from the public, the man behind Steamspy, Sergey Galyonkin, points out on Twitter that it isn't too hard to become a dev and get access to the data:
"Well, fifty bucks and you're a developer :)"