SteamDB is an excellent resource—as someone who occasionally has to pull up a game’s concurrent numbers or pricing to make a point, I’d be lying if I said I haven’t used it in a professional capacity. What’s been more staggering is its status as a site run entirely on donations.
Well, that’s ending soon. The site’s founder, xPaw, has decided to move on due to a feeling of burnout. In their full statement, they write: “After Covid and with the rise of AI, the internet we once loved is gone, and with it my passion. I have started experiencing burnout with the project, but I powered through.
“A few years ago I tried to find someone to continue the project, but I couldn’t find a team that I was confident in, so I decided to keep going by myself. Steam keeps growing, in terms of games, players, and the number of new features being added. It’s hard to keep on top of this alone, and the mental load has only kept increasing, and in good conscience I cannot continue like this.”
The buyers in question? NexusMods, which has its own sister announcement on its site that details its motivations, which are twofold. Firstly, having the information SteamDB has collated over the years is useful: “We have already started collecting Steam game data ourselves, but once an update is pushed, manifests and data for the old versions become much more difficult to access. SteamDB already does this far better than we can, and has a massive back-catalogue to draw from.”
Another, the site says, is the fact that SteamDB’s database can help its mod manager “better understand which version of the game you’re running, whether mods you’re installing were built for it, and whether an incoming game update is likely to cause issues.
“It could also make it possible for Collections and other mod lists to better specify the exact version of a game they were built for, rather than relying on someone finding that information buried in a description, comment, or forum post.”
That’s all in the future, though—one that looks good for xPaw, who will no longer be forced to shoulder the burden of running SteamDB on their own, but perhaps a big question mark for folks who actually use SteamDB. Primarily because it was a donation-fed project, and thus immune to the kind of unpleasantness that comes with sites that need to turn a profit.
In a FAQ, NexusMods cops to this being a consideration going forward: “We’re going to be straight about this rather than dance around it: yes, SteamDB needs to make money. What xPaw has built—and kept running largely through personal dedication and community donations—is an extraordinary achievement.
“Giving it the team, infrastructure and long-term investment it deserves is how we protect that work and ensure SteamDB can thrive for the next decade and beyond.”
That doesn’t mean you’re going to be flooded with ads, though, at least, that’s the plan: “No. We don’t have plans to introduce display or programmatic advertising on SteamDB. Over time, we may explore things like affiliate links and partnerships where they genuinely provide value to the user.” Nexus Mods also plans to keep the site free: “nothing you know and use today is getting taken away and sold back to you.”
Either way, it’s the end of an era—the turning of a great free resource into one that, as Nexus Mods states, does need to make money now. xPaw says they have “full confidence the team will be able to continue improving the project for gamers, developers and publishers alike.”
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