As you may know, there’s a lot of new games coming out on Steam recently. In quieter times it was easier for a developer to stand out, because they had to share the spotlight with less competitors. But that has completely changed. Of course developers work hard to create an awesome game, but sometimes even that isn’t enough to stand out.

So they turn to (paid) advertising, hoping to get the game the attention it deserves, and to make some money. Makes sense, right? Unfortunately Steam and Steam’s developer backend isn’t designed for this… at all. They can surely advertise, but because the store page, game sale and download go through Steam it’s impossible to know what campaign, tweet or website actually succeeds in finding interested players. This is where we come in.

Steam Data Suite does ‘campaign attribution’ in the least intrusive way possible. Let me explain how it works in short.

• When you click a link to the store page of a game using our toolset, we register that click.
• Once some of the ‘clickers’ start the game for the first time, we register that as well. We call that the ‘first-run’.
• Our fancy algorithm is then able to connect the click to the first-run, reporting a successful sale/download through that link back to the developer.
• That’s it.

Neither the click or first-run data is shared with anyone. We don’t collect anything regarding to your steam account, your computer or your person. Nothing personal is stored, nor is the raw data directly accessible to the developer. We also pinky promise to keep it safe.

Privacy is very important, and we probably hate it just as much as you when companies are being dodgy or unethical about it. We believe that the way we created Steam Data Suite is the most minimalist and privacy honoring way to provide this type of feature to developers. The impact is way less than clicking on a mobile ad, using Google or connecting to a public wi-fi, for example.