Frequently Asked Questions

Join our Discord server.

We prefer to get bug reports, feature requests, or general questions on Discord when privacy is not required, as other community members may answer your question quickly.

We can not help you with your Steam account or games.

Click here if you understand that we are not Valve or Steam and want to get our email.

⚠ SteamDB is not affiliated with Valve or Steam. SteamDB or Steam will never direct message you (on Discord or anywhere else).

Users claiming to be a Valve employee or Steam moderator, accounts asking to verify your items, and users who send you a message which insist you need to trade your items to them for investigation or security reasons should immediately be reported for trade scams.

Please read Scam FAQ written by Steam Support here.

If you are trying to contact Steam, use Steam Support.

SteamDB was created to give more insight into the Steam database. We track updates for both applications and packages, we keep a history of all changes made to both applications and packages. We also have a range of other tools such as the Calculator to give people insight into their Steam accounts that would otherwise be impossible.

SteamDB is a purely informational website, it does not provide any downloads, and does not solicit piracy.

This website is being developed by xPaw. Do not send me emails, if you want to contact SteamDB, see the question above.

We use SteamKit to interface with the Steam network. We request changes for all applications and packages once in a while, but mostly rely on Steam's own update system which tells us which applications and packages have updated.

All of the basic application and package information we provide (unless noted otherwise) is publicly available from Steam itself, and can be acquired by anyone with a regular Steam account. For example, if you launch Steam with the console (steam://open/console) and give the command app_info_print 440 it'll display most of the information we have on our page for Team Fortress 2. It is possible to automate it using Valve's SteamCMD.

You can take a look at SteamWebPipes, a real-time stream app code to see how it's done on a smaller scale.

For most store information, we parse the store pages, because not all information is available in all the APIs. But for your use case you may be able to find an API that gives you enough information. There are various Web APIs that allow you get store items, community items data, achievements, and other data.

If you want a Python library to get data from Steam, take a look at ValvePython/steam. Also take a look at steamctl which provides a lot of useful commands.

If you want a Node.JS library, take a look at node-steam-user. There are libraries to interact with Steam in many different languages, if you prefer something else just search for it.

If parsing appinfo.vdf is enough for your use case (accessing games you own), then a look at a basic parser for that file.

If you want to download specific depots and manifests, use DepotDownloader.

In short, no. We believe if you need to get Steam data, you can get it from Steam directly using their WebAPI or using libraries like SteamKit (see above).

SteamDB is a community website and we do not make money, and maintaining the site is already enough work for us. Creating a good API is a lot of work and a big vector for abuse which we are not equipped to deal with.

Take a look at "How are we getting this information?" question above for more information about getting information from Steam directly.

No, there's a chance you'll get automatically banned for doing so.

We also do not allow scraping/crawling on SteamDB. Please get the information from Steam itself, take a look at "How are we getting this information?" question above for more information.

We do not offer direct data access or data dumps. You may be able to get data directly from Steam using SteamKit or by parsing store pages.

If you are seeking a dataset for data scraping, data analysis, or database courses, please search for alternative sources.

If you are looking at this for educational and academic purposes, you can email us using your university email with the necessary details.

This process is exclusively intended for academic purposes and should not be used for commercial purposes. Selling or publishing the data in its entirety is strictly prohibited. Moreover, using this data to train artificial intelligence models is not allowed.

Our website uses:

• Latest PHP
• MariaDB for the database
• InfluxDB for charts data
• nginx as the webserver
• memcached for caching
• .NET for the Steam bot

We also use the following services, libraries, and technologies:

• SteamKit for keeping app info up to date.
• Open Exchange Rates for currency conversions.
• Images.weserv.nl for serving third-party images that don't use Steam CDN.
• Barter.vg to obtain non-Steam game bundle information.
• SteamSpy, PlayTracker, VG Insights, Gamalytic for their game owner and playtime estimations.
• IGDB to obtain Twitch game ids and link them to Steam appids.
• SullyGnome for providing historic Twitch viewers data before 2021.
• IsThereAnyDeal for providing historic Steam prices for US/UK/EU regions before 2016.
• SteamSpy for providing historic user reviews before 2024.
• Cloudflare to make the site faster and protect against attacks.
• Algolia for instant search.
• Bugsnag for error tracking.
• Highcharts for drawing charts.
• Datatables for various tables.
• Octicons for icons.
• Inter typeface for the font.

Also take a look at our projects on GitHub.

Our SteamDB Discord bot is provided as-is. This bot uses slash commands, and does not have access to messages that are sent in the server.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Steam requires manifest request codes as of 2022.

Manifest request codes are required for downloading manifests (file list), and are valid only for 15 minutes, and requires ownership of the depot to get a code.

Game can be donated with a key, by sending a gift, or using curator system.

After some testing we came to conclusion that even with Valve's official sources its impossible to get correct game count due to all sorts of weird stuff.

For example, "All Games" tab in your game list displays some DLCs which are not returned by the WebAPI and thus not displayed in our calculator.

But there are some games that are returned by the WebAPI and are not displayed on the game list too (which are visible in your library).

There also are some free games that are visible in your library, but are not returned by the WebAPI, and the other way around (for example Spacewar and Dota 2 Test).

There are probably other edge cases that we are unaware of, but our calculator's game count should be pretty close to being true.

Some DLCs have their capsule images (logos) set, which makes them visible in the game list. Only very few DLCs have small icons uploaded, and that makes them show up in our calculator. Our calculator does not count DLCs as games.

We keep track of lowest prices for each game, and for each owned game in your account, we add up these lowest recorded prices.

On sales page, you can filter this under tags by clicking [-] button, or simply follow this link. This will also hide "Steam is learning".

Find the game page on our site using the search field in the navbar, then click Information tab.

If a game has "Exclude from family sharing (exfgls) — Yes" in the table, then this game can not be shared.

We have such filter on our sales page! In filter by type dropdown, you can select "DLCs for owned games (sale)" which will show all DLCs for your games that are currently on sale. There is also "DLCs for owned games (all)" which will show DLCs even if they are not currently on sale.

SteamDB is well optimized in how it updates player counts for all games on Steam. We update data and charts for the current top 800 games every 5 minutes, and all the other games every 10 minutes. This allows us to track player numbers very accurately.

As a result, we start tracking new releases as soon as they are available, in some cases even in early access. A good example is Cyberpunk 2077 where it hit 1,054,388 players right on launch day. Another example is old games getting new peaks, and this can be verified against Steam's own most played games page.

As a reminder, the concurrent player count comes directly from the Steam API, there is no double counting or guesstimations, the number is directly provided by Valve.

In fact, we can't update more frequently than five minutes because Steam itself caches the player count for around that time.

When games are available early to pre-purchase owners or deluxe package owners, the way it works is that there is a release state override for these owners, but the game itself is not released. As such, most features are not available including reviewing the game, viewing others' achievements, family sharing, getting the player count, and more.

It is possible to get CCU from an account that owns the game with early access. Because of this, it is possible to make SteamDB track games like it, but it requires our bot to own the game with early access and then for us to add a specific hack.

No, the concurrent player counts are returned by the Steam API directly, thus are not affected by privacy settings and they are exact numbers, not estimations.

Private games feature also does not affect this.

Game publishers set the discounts, and they can choose any discount they want. You can look up any game on our site and look at its price history to determine which previous sales the game was discounted in. If a game appeared in all previous major sales, it's pretty safe to say it will be discounted again.

We do not know what specific games will be discounted in an upcoming sale, what prices will be, or what discounts they will have. Thematic sales are limited to games the sale is about.

Also see this FAQ for developers on the partner site.

View upcoming sale dates here or Events in our Discord server.

Certain Steam regions employ aggregated USD pricing rather than local currencies to offer reduced USD rates.

Since it's unfeasible to symbolize all these regions with one 18 pixel flag (except for the CIS), SteamDB displays the flag of the country from which it retrieves the pricing data from the Steam store.

The countries using discounted USD prices are:

• CIS territories - Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan
• Latin American Countries - Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela
• Middle Eastern and North African Countries - Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Sudan, Tunisia, Turkey, Yemen
• South Asian Countries - Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka

Steam Fests are themed events designed to promote a genre of games or games tied to a certain theme.

Steam Fests are not sale events, as participating games are NOT required to go on sale. However, Fests usually do feature discounts.

Steam Fests do not usually feature badges or other profile items, but some fests may feature badges and/or community items.

We use IGameInventory service. Specifically GetItemDefMeta and GetItemDefArchive API endpoints. There are examples on GitHub on how to use these correctly.

Every app page on SteamDB has a price table and a price graph right under it.

In the navbar, there is a search box, enter the game name you want to find, and click the game. If the game is not free, it will put you right on the prices tab where you can see the price history.

There are other tabs like charts, which display Steam player counts.

Yes, there is an RSS available on individual game's patchnotes page. However this is heavily cached and is not intended to be used for automatically monitoring for new patches. If you need to detect new updates, take a look at "How are we getting this information?" question above for more information on how to achieve this yourself.

SteamDB does not support piracy, it does not provide downloads, it does not sell keys, it does not link to any websites that do any of these activities.

SteamDB only embeds Steam's official widget for purchasing the game. We link to the official Steam store where possible. All image assets are directly linked from the Steam content delivery network.

This website displays various information and statistics about Steam applications which are obtained from Steam APIs and functionality similar to the Steam client.

Many developers and publishers find our website useful and use it to help with their processes, such as tracking concurrent players over time, and many more.

We consider our website to fall under fair use, please do not send us DMCA takedowns.

We hear this a lot, and we can only recommend developers to be careful with what they put on the Steam partner website.

For example, don't name your depots, branches or even test apps to the actual thing they contain if it hasn't been announced yet.

Ugh, that really sucks. We're sorry. However, there's not much we can do about it. It's very important to know how to interact with the Steam partner backend before adding information to it as much of it is publicly viewable by anyone with a Steam account.

Unless we have a bug, the data comes directly from Steam, and as such it is usually the developers of a game that need to fix the data on their end.

Some examples include release dates (there are multiple fields developers can set), available operating systems, exclusion from family sharing.

We do not manually edit any of the data that is available on our site.

They are not. Even though manifest ids are tracked in appinfo for local branch (lcsrequired flag), they are not downloadable from the public Steam CDN because they are never uploaded there.

Using a LCS improves depot iteration time since they are not uploaded and distributed through the public Steam network. Instead, all the depot content is stored on your LCS in chunk files and served to Steam clients that have access to your LCS.

Read more about SteamPipe Local Content Server in the Steamworks documentation.

We do not delete history entries and as the process is entirely automated, any other Steam client or automated bot would have archived the same data at the given time.

This is especially relevant for information that also appears on the store page, which is indexed by many different sites such as archive.org. If you do not wish to leak data, don't publish that information via the Steam partner backend in the first place.

We use IGDB to link games on Twitch to Steam games. Contact IGDB admins so they can correctly update the metadata for your game on IGDB.com. Once updated there, it should make Twitch charts appear on our website on your game's page.

An application can have multiple branches. Other than the "public" branch, there can be other branches. Other branches are often used for storing an older version of the game for people to downgrade to, or for testing new patches/content. These can often be found in the "Betas" tab in the app's properties in the Steam client. Some branches might require a password, and they won't be visible in the drop-down list until the correct password is entered.

Read more about branches in Steamworks documentation.

An Application (or app) is the main representation of a product on Steam. An App generally has its own store page, its own Community Hub, and is what appears in customers' libraries.

Read more about apps in Steamworks documentation.

Steam Bundles is a feature that allows multiple products to be bundled together at a discount to provide additional value and benefit to your best fans. Steam bundles are a collection of multiple packages.

Read more about bundles in Steamworks documentation.

A package (also known as sub) is a collection of one or more application and depot that can be sold via Steam or can be granted to users based on the activation of a Steam key.

After a user purchases or activates a package, the contents of that package dictate which applications or depot contents the user has permission to download and launch.

Read more about packages in Steamworks documentation.

PICS stands for Product Info Cache Server. This is the system that Steam uses to hold information about applications and packages. If you've heard of appinfo, that information comes from PICS.

When an application or package changes, Steam creates a "changelist" to notify all Steam clients that something changed. This changelist has a number, referred to as a changenumber. This changenumber increments globally and is not a per-app thing.

Change list and number terminology comes from Perforce, a version history control software, which Valve uses internally.

App and package updates do not even have to be related to the app/package itself as Valve does periodical changes to a batch of apps/packages. Usually when such a change happens, it affects many apps at once.

For a changenumber to change on an app that hasn't been active in months, it's more likely a useless change rather than a sign of life.

All recent changenumbers can be found on our changelist or recent history pages.

Steam is complex, and besides PICS information, which is used by the Steam client itself, there are other sources of information: web APIs, store, community and others. We have various scripts that check these sources, and if we see something of interest, we track it. Because of that, these changes do not have a changenumber from PICS, and thus are tracked separately by us. Such changes are prefixed with U: in history.

Build IDs are a globally incrementing number. Build IDs are updated when a new build of an application is pushed. This means actual content has updated because of a patch.

A build is the result of uploading your content to steam, it can contain 1 or more depots and is a representation of the content in those depots at that point in time.

Read more about builds in Steamworks documentation.

Depot is a logical grouping of files which are all delivered to a customer as a single group. Depots are uniquely identified by a Depot ID. When a customer installs an app, one or more depots are downloaded and "mounted" on their local drive.

Read more about depots in Steamworks documentation.

A manifest is a listing of all the files which are included with a depot build, along with metadata for all of the files, including the file size, SHA1 hash, and a set of flags. Manifest IDs are a randomly generated.

This program connects to your Steam account using SteamKit library, similar to how most Steam bots work. After logging in, it requests all app tokens, package tokens, and depot decryption keys that your account owns (has access to).

All this information is the same to every Steam user, but requires owning the content to actually request it. Since it is not reasonable for us to buy our bot every single Game on Steam, we chose to crowd-source this data.

However, if you have taken part in a closed or a limited beta, developers may still figure out who the submitter may be through the process of elimination. If you are in a closed or limited beta, have a non disclosure agreement, or otherwise do not want to leak private information, do not use this program.

If you do not want to enter your password in the program, you can leave username empty, and it will do an anonymous dump from your Steam client files. This method is limited as it will only reliably work for games you currently have installed.

If you are a game developer, you should be aware that your private app info will become visible on the site.

Read more about Steam depot download and preload system.

Read more and download the token dumper.

If you submit enough new information that we do not yet have, we will give you donator badge on the site.

Our dumper program has a SteamTokenDumper.config.ini file which can be used to configure it.

The possible configuration options are:

• RememberLogin Set this to 1 if you wish dumper to automatically login next time you run it. This saves a "login key" (same as how Steam remembers your login), your password is not stored.
• SkipAutoGrant Set this to 1 if you wish to skip auto granted developer packages.
• SkipAppIds Put app ids to skip separated by a comma that you do not want to submit a token for. This will also prevent getting depot keys for depots in these apps (as app info will not be fetched).
• VerifyBeforeSubmit Set this to 1 if you wish dumper to ask for confirmation before sending the results.
• DumpPayload Set this to 1 if you wish dumper to write the resulting app tokens, package tokens, and depot keys to a file.

App tokens allow our site to display information for upcoming games, deleted games, private betas, and otherwise hidden apps.

Package tokens allow our site to display information for packages (subs) such as which apps they contain, and which restrictions they may have. This is especially important for subs that are not purchaseable on the store.

Unfortunately, package info does not contain the package name, so having an access token will not make our website update the name. The only way is package being visible on the store, donating a Steam key (the key does not have to get activated by our bot to update the name), or the licenses page for free packages.

Depot keys allow our site to display file list and file names, as well as tracking their updates.

However, as of June 2022, our bot has to own a depot/game to track file lists due to a change Valve made.

No. We believe if you need to know status of Steam services, you can figure it on your own without using a third party service. If your trading bots are having issues, report it to users. You can link your users to steamstat.us for a second opinion.

You can use Valve's official API to get Counter-Strike servers' status, which can be accessed at https://api.steampowered.com/ICSGOServers_730/GetGameServersStatus/v1/

CM stands for a connection manager. It is an edge server that your Steam client connects to.

In context of Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike 2 it is an item server and a matchmaking service.

SteamDB does not sell your data, nor uses it for any other purposes except for those recorded here.

SteamDB.info may store following information in its access logs such as the URL user is visiting, user's IP address, browser user-agent, referral URLs. The information is retained for a bare minimum, usually less than a month and are automatically deleted. These logs may be used to detect abuse and to improve service.

SteamDB.info only sets strictly necessary cookies, such as logged in session (__Host-steamdb), and your currency if you change it (__Host-cc). Cloudflare anti-abuse and anti-bot software may set additional temporary cookies, you can view Cloudflare's cookie policy here.

We use third parties for their services or as data processors:

We use Cloudflare to protect our website from abuse and cache commonly visited assets. You can view Cloudflare's privacy policy here.

We use Steam's content delivery network to serve assets such as game images. You can view Valve's privacy policy here.

We use BugSnag for error reporting, no identifiable information such as IP address is stored with the error.

Some images such as inventory item images, and user provided images in patchnotes may be proxied by images.weserv.nl service. You can view their privacy policy here.

Instant Search feature, including autocompletion of search results uses Algolia service. You can view their privacy policy here.

Some pages such as blog posts and patch note pages may contain YouTube videos using youtube-nocookie.com.

It is completely safe to login to SteamDB because we use Steam's official OpenID provider, basically a safe way to authenticate your SteamID. The only information we receive this way is your public SteamID, not your username or password.

We only receive public information via the Steam API if your Steam profile is public. We use GetPlayerSummaries and GetOwnedGames Steam WebAPIs to retrieve that information. We do not (and cannot) receive any of your private information like username, password, email or any other personal data associated with your Steam account.

If you have logged in, you can just as easily delete all the data we have stored about your account from the sign out page. Data that may have been stored in logs or backups will be removed during automatic rollover.

You can view your data on your user page.

When you connect your Discord account, we only store your Discord numeric id and a timestamp of when the connection was made. You can disconnect your account on your settings page.

Under certain conditions we may also cleanup and delete accounts that haven't logged into SteamDB for a while.

Calculator page itself only temporarily caches the data you see on the page when you lookup a profile for up to an hour. We do not store historical changes of your data.

For badges pages, top game owners, and top levels pages we only store and show up to 2000 top public profiles. When a profile is looked up in our calculator, and we see that the profile is private, data about this profile will be deleted.

If you want to hide your profile, make your Steam profile private, then we and any other website will not be able to retrieve any data about it.

Anyone can get this information about your and any other SteamID by using the Steam Web API, there are many websites that do a similar lookup.

As per Steam privacy policy agreement, some basic information such as the public persona name you have chosen to represent you on Steam and your Avatar picture, as well as whether you have received a ban for cheating in a multiplayer game are always accessible using the Steam API.

A separate SteamDB browser extension privacy policy can be found here.