SteamDB vs SteamSpy vs VG Insights vs Gamalytic (2026)

Here is the short version: SteamDB has the most accurate Steam data on the internet and makes no sales estimates of its own. SteamSpy invented the sales-estimation genre and has been running on a degraded methodology since Steam’s April 2018 privacy change. If you want an actual units-and-revenue number for a specific game in 2026, the two tools doing that job seriously are VG Insights (now owned by Sensor Tower) and Gamalytic, and Gamalytic is the only one of the four with a detailed error study still on its live site.

The rest of this post covers where each tool’s numbers come from, what accuracy each vendor claims (self-graded exams, all of them), and which tool to open for which job. I reread each vendor’s pricing and accuracy pages on 2 November 2026. The one exception is VG Insights’ accuracy article, which now survives only as an Internet Archive copy.

Need one number right now? Paste a game’s App ID or store URL into our free revenue calculator for estimated units and net revenue from its review count, then come back for how far to trust it.

SteamDB reports facts. The other three report estimates. Mixing the two up is the most common data mistake I see indie devs make, and it runs through everything below.

SteamDB is a third-party tracker (not affiliated with Valve) that records what Steam’s own systems expose publicly. Its FAQ is explicit about what that means: concurrent player counts come directly from the Steam API, are exact rather than estimated, and update every few minutes. On top of that you get full price history in every regional currency, follower counts over time, tag and metadata changes, and depot-level patch history.

What SteamDB does not do is make a sales or revenue estimate of its own. Its charts pages carry an “Owner estimations” panel, but those numbers come from other vendors: the FAQ credits SteamSpy, PlayTracker, VG Insights, and Gamalytic “for their game owners estimations”. On 2 November 2026 the panel for Hollow Knight read about 9.1M by VG Insights, about 13.2M by Gamalytic and about 19.4M by PlayTracker, so the highest was about 2.1x the lowest.

Keeping to facts is what keeps it useful. Because the concurrent player (CCU) numbers are exact, you can build your own estimates on top of them with known math. A launch-week peak CCU multiplied by a genre-appropriate factor gets you into the right order of magnitude for units sold - we walk through the full method in how to estimate Steam sales from SteamDB, and the CCU-specific math has its own guide in estimating Steam sales from concurrent players.

SteamSpy, launched by Sergey Galyonkin in 2015, worked by sampling millions of public Steam profiles and counting who owned what. It was never exact, but the sampling method was statistically honest and the error bars were quantifiable.

In April 2018, Valve changed Steam’s privacy defaults so that game libraries are hidden unless a user opts in to sharing them. That single change removed SteamSpy’s data source overnight. The site came back a few weeks later on a machine-learning model that infers ownership from indirect signals, and Galyonkin himself described the rebuilt version as not very accurate. Nothing has structurally improved since; SteamSpy’s own about page still warns that figures are extrapolated from limited samples and that the site is completely unreliable for recently released games. Of small numbers it says, “I wouldn’t trust any number below 30,000”, which covers most indie games.

In practice, here is what SteamSpy gives you in 2026:

• •Owner counts as wide buckets (“20,000 .. 50,000”), not point estimates. A 2.5x-wide range is honest about uncertainty but useless for revenue math.
• •Genre and tag aggregates that are still directionally interesting for market sizing, because errors partially cancel out across thousands of games.
• •A free API that a lot of academic papers and hobby projects still build on, mostly because it is free and stable, not because it is current.

Extra features sit behind Patreon pledges rather than a normal subscription. I keep SteamSpy in the list because you will run into its numbers constantly in old articles and Reddit threads, and you need to know how much salt to apply: a lot. For any game released after 2018, prefer the two tools below.

VG Insights (VGI) was founded in 2020 by Karl Kontus and started from an upgraded version of the Boxleiter method - the old “reviews times a multiplier” trick, which we break down in the Boxleiter method explained. Its Game Developer article fit review-to-sales ratios against a leaked 2018 dataset of more than 10,000 games. By 2024 its methodology article listed four inputs: review multiples adjusted for release year, genre and price; a tracked sample of Steam profiles; Steam’s weekly top sellers lists; and its own data on units sold.

Its stated accuracy comes from that 2024 article. Across 55 reported sales figures for about 40 games, total estimated units came out 3% high, and 46 of the 55 (84%) landed within 15%. VGI adds that it “cannot guarantee” an unbiased sample, because publishers choose which numbers to announce, and that outliers tend to be smaller and recently released games. Individual games can and do miss by much more; the review multiplier alone spans a 20-60x range depending on genre. The live URL now redirects to Sensor Tower’s blog, so I read this in an Internet Archive copy from December 2024.

The big 2025 news: Sensor Tower acquired VG Insights in March 2025, and the product now runs as “Video Game Insights by Sensor Tower”. The announcement says it tracks “over 150,000 titles on Steam”, and VGI’s own home page says “over 100,000 Steam games”. The vginsights.com URLs now redirect into Sensor Tower’s platform, which is why half the methodology links you find in older blog posts are dead.

On price: VGI’s pricing page lists one plan, Business, at “Custom pricing based on # of licenses and extra options”, with a Request a Demo Call button. PlayStation and Xbox data, full history and API access sit in that plan. Free game pages still work without signing in: on 2 November 2026 Hollow Knight’s showed an estimated 9.1m units sold, with history and regional data marked “Unlock with an Enterprise subscription”. If a predictable monthly bill matters to you, that opacity is itself a data point.

Gamalytic is the youngest of the four and the one that has leaned hardest into transparency. Its about page calls it “a hobby project of mine to help indie developers with market research and marketing”, so expect a small independent site and not a data company. Its methodology, described on that page and in its blog, combines several independent signals instead of relying on reviews alone: tracked top-seller rank movements, concurrent player counts, a tuned Boxleiter-style review model, and regression across games with publicly confirmed sales.

The accuracy claim is unusually specific. In Gamalytic’s self-published tests against games with known sales figures, 77% of individual game estimates landed within a 30% margin of error, 98% within 50%, and aggregate-level estimates were about 99% accurate.

Read that chart with both eyes open. It is a vendor grading its own homework, the test set skews toward games popular enough to have announced their numbers, and Gamalytic itself flags that estimates degrade for small games, free-to-play titles, and games sold heavily in bundles. Its blog names the test set, about 120 games with public sales data, leaving out games under 1,000 copies. VGI’s 2024 numbers look tighter on paper, but they rest on 55 figures across about 40 games and have left the live site. “77% within 30%” is still a useful error bar for planning: it means any single Gamalytic number should be read as a range, roughly 0.7x to 1.3x. Gamalytic’s free game pages print that kind of range too: Hollow Knight’s read an estimated 13.2M copies sold (9.9M to 16.5M) on 2 November 2026.

Pricing is published and indie-friendly. As of its pricing page on 2 November 2026: a free tier with per-game copies and revenue estimates, a Starter plan at $25/month (all filters, a year of historical data, wishlist estimates, and 2,500 API requests per day), and a Professional plan at $75/month or $810/year (all history since 2015, review sentiment, wishlist detail and full API access). It offers a 30-day money back guarantee. Check the page again before subscribing, because this is exactly the kind of detail that changes.

Point-in-time comparisons are rare because developers seldom announce exact figures, but here is one documented case. In September 2023 the developers of Dwarves: Glory, Death and Loot announced they had sold over 30,000 copies. Gamalytic published a comparison of what each estimation engine showed at that moment:

Full provenance warning: the comparison came from Gamalytic’s own account, so of course it is a case where Gamalytic looked best. I include it anyway because the SteamSpy number is the real lesson - off by 5x in the wrong direction, on a post-2018 indie release, which is exactly the failure mode the privacy change created. VGI undershooting by 40% on a single mid-size game is also consistent with its “accurate in aggregate, noisy per game” framing. One game proves nothing about averages; it does show the spread you should expect when you cross-check.

That cross-check habit is the actual takeaway. When I research a comparable game, I pull both VGI and Gamalytic, and if the two disagree by more than 2x I treat the number as unknown and fall back to review counts and CCU math.

And the decision rules I actually follow:

1. 01Never quote an estimate without naming the tool. “Gamalytic estimates 40k units” is a claim you can check; “it sold 40k” is not.
2. 02Facts before estimates. If SteamDB’s exact CCU contradicts an estimator’s story, believe SteamDB and re-derive.
3. 03Two estimators or zero. Within 2x of each other, average them. Further apart, do your own review-multiplier math.
4. 04Apply the error bar. A single Gamalytic figure is a 0.7x-1.3x range at best; budget against the low end.

Steam Page Analyzer is not a fifth estimation database and does not pretend to be. Our free revenue calculator does the “so what does that mean in dollars” step: paste a Steam App ID or store URL, and it reads the review count, applies a genre-specific copies-per-review multiplier, then takes off Steam’s cut and a regional pricing factor to show estimated units and net revenue. It rests on reviews alone and tracks nothing over time, so treat it as a fast first read and not a replacement for the tools above. We compared how the popular calculators handle that math, and where they quietly disagree, in our Steam revenue calculator comparison.

The workflow that has held up best for me: SteamDB for the facts, Gamalytic plus VG Insights for the estimate, our calculator for the net-revenue translation, and the Steam Page Analyzer itself for the question the databases cannot answer - whether your own store page will convert the traffic those comparable games are telling you to expect.

Which reporting tool is worth using to monitor game sales and revenue?

For your own game, use Steamworks: it is free, and its Sales & Activations Reports portal gives “a near real-time view into revenue, units, player counts, geographic breakdown”, with deductions such as refunds showing up in your monthly report. For someone else’s game nobody outside Valve and the publisher has real figures, so read the free game pages on Gamalytic and VG Insights first, and pay for Gamalytic Starter at $25 a month only when you need its filters, wishlist estimates or a year of history. If you sell on several stores, IndieBI’s Data Platform collects sales from each one daily, free up to $250K in lifetime revenue tracked, then from $39 a month billed annually or $49 a month billed monthly. Prices read on 2 November 2026. For a quick estimate on one game with no signup, paste its App ID into our revenue calculator.

What are good market research platforms for indie developers on a budget?

Free tools cover most of it: SteamDB for exact player counts and price history, the free game pages on Gamalytic and VG Insights for estimated copies and revenue, and our revenue calculator for a fast read on one game. Pay only when a specific question needs more, and try one month first. Gamalytic Starter ($25 a month, cancel any time) adds all filters, a year of history and wishlist estimates. GameDiscoverCo’s paid newsletter tier adds a data suite that ranks unreleased and released Steam games by popularity and hype; the plan data on its Substack page showed $19 a month or $190 a year on 2 November 2026, so confirm at checkout. VG Insights’ Business plan and GameDiscoverCo Pro are sold through demo calls, which puts them in a different budget. Whatever you use, write down which tool each number came from.

What are owner estimations on SteamDB?

They are other companies’ estimates of how many people own a game, shown on SteamDB’s charts pages, and SteamDB does not calculate them itself. Its FAQ credits SteamSpy, PlayTracker, VG Insights and Gamalytic “for their game owners estimations”. On 2 November 2026 Hollow Knight’s panel read about 9.1M by VG Insights, about 13.2M by Gamalytic and about 19.4M by PlayTracker. Read them as a range and check what each vendor counts: that Gamalytic figure matches what Gamalytic’s own page calls copies sold, while it estimates owners at 18.3M. How to estimate Steam sales from SteamDB covers the math when you want your own number.

Does SteamDB have a sales calculator?

No. The calculator on SteamDB values a Steam account: its FAQ says “for each owned game in your account, we add up these lowest recorded prices.” For a game’s sales, our free revenue calculator takes an App ID or store URL and estimates units and net revenue from the review count, with the multiplier shown.

How accurate is SteamDB?

Its player counts are exact, and the estimates shown beside them are not. SteamDB’s FAQ says the concurrent count “comes directly from the Steam API, there is no double counting or guesstimations”, and that it updates the top 800 games every 5 minutes and the rest every 10. The owner estimations are other vendors’ numbers with their own error bars: Gamalytic reports 77% of games within 30%, and VG Insights reported 84% within 15% on 55 figures across about 40 games in 2024, both self-graded. Gamalytic vs VG Insights compares the two in more depth.