Valve ends Steam support for Google Analytics, citing concerns over customer privacy

Valve, the video game developer that is perhaps better known for its digital video game store Steam, has announced that it will stop supporting Google Analytics on Steam. This comes as Valve is implementing a number of changes to the way game developers measure traffic data for their games on Steam.

In a blog post about the upcoming changes to Steam traffic reporting, Valve started off by reiterating that it puts player privacy first. According to them, Steam does not share personally identifiable information which has led to some trade-offs being made when it comes to reporting user traffic data. They add that they intentionally do not collect information regarding user demographics such as age, gender or race.

Valve then notes that Google will be making ending their current Universal Analytics system in July, which powers Google Analytics at the moment. Google will be replacing it with a new system called Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Google Analytics is basically a web analytics service that allows you to track and report website traffic, which for game developers may be helpful to see who and where are checking out their titles. However, upon the transition to GA4, Valve says that they will be ending support for Google Analytics on Steam due to concerns over customer privacy.

“As time has gone on we’ve come to realize that Google’s tracking solutions don’t align well with our approach to customer privacy, and so with the migration to GA4 we’ve made the decision to end our support of Google’s analytics systems on Steam.

If you are currently making use of UA, you will find that as of July 1st, your Google Analytics reporting will no longer be getting data from Steam,” – Valve

On top of that, Valve notes that there will be some other changes to Steam traffic reporting. This includes planned updates for highly requested features, such as geographic breakdowns for visitors to the games that can help developers identify what languages to support, as well as better identification of external sources to see which websites are sending user traffic to their games on Steam. There will also be more support for marketing campaigns by developers to better identify how well its doing, such as visitor device category and one-day conversion tracking.

For more about the upcoming changes to Steam’s traffic reporting system, you can click here to see Valve’s full blog post.