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(In an email to Ars Technica, Gamstat's administrator said he

March 22, 2019 by Katherine Berry

(In an email to Ars Technica, Gamstat's administrator said he was the only person to provide this analysis. "We have a very large community of users that we respect and appreciate and that includes many of you," he said.)

Gamstat's algorithm is a little different, and the user sampling protocol differs from Steam Gauge and Steam Spy (which uses a random sample of the entire universe of the Steam network). It uses the standard approach of putting individual titles into a database to estimate how much they will sell for a given period of time. Gamstat's algorithm also draws on multiple factors for this purpose—the PSN network, the Xbox Live Marketplace, and Microsoft's own marketplace.

"The first time we ran across this idea of our own system, we thought it was great," Gamstat's administrator, Dennis, told Ars Technica. "But the algorithm itself seems to be just a way of gathering data on how much people are playing the game without having to look at the actual network."

Gamstat has also added a few new features that may be worth checking out:

• You can set up a custom user account to access the database. "The first thing we do is go to https://steamcommunity.com/profiles and set up a user account," Gamstat's administrator said. That account will allow you to create a user account that will be able to access the information about any games you play. "That's the first step of the full API," Gamstat's admin said.

• All of the current games are sorted by age category. "We are a user-generated league," Gamstat's admin said. "We are not a paid league, so we have very limited access to the data." Gamstat's admin said that it might take some time to gather the information about those games.