9 January 2021
Dear users and visitors,
I am sorry to announce that as of today, SteamPrices.com has closed its doors.
When I started this website over 10 years ago, Steam had a lot less currencies than today and allowed users to buy from other store regions. They also lacked a lot of the features users wanted, e.g. more options for searching games and wishlist notifications.
With the release of dozens of new currencies on Steam since approx. 7 years ago, SteamPrices.com tried to keep up the pace and index prices for all new regions. This was difficult on the technical side and made running the website a lot more expensive. A few years later, I decided to remove the least popular regions to reduce the costs and improve website performance. In recent years, Steam also added the features and options that its users were asking for.
There was a need for websites like SteamPrices.com but this has changed in my opinion. More and more features became obsolete and I countered it with meta-analysis like Price Tracker and Publisher comparison, but the website statistics show that these features were not being used a lot - in the end, they were not in spirit of the initial website idea and goal: compare prices from different Steam regions. Features like personalized RSS feeds and profile cards were used more than others but also caused quite a few resource problems.
SteamPrices.com has always just been a hobby of mine. It was a nice playground to test and improve my programming skills and I wanted to apply all best practices that I learned. We had a complete website relaunch in 2015 where I added a mobile friendly responsive design and accessibility. But as all hobbies go, you have to find the time and motivation to stick with it. Both were lacking in the last three years and the website went into some sort of slumber. Most tasks always were fully automated and worked without me doing something. When Steam changed their website design and code, I came back to the project to fix the apparent issues. Some issues from the early days were never fully solved and probably never would have, i.e. wrong price information during a sale for games that are part of a cheaper bundle or package. Additionally, defending against people that tried to gather price information from SteamPrices.com instead of Steam was always feeling like an uphill battle.
Of course, this decision was not made easy. But it was made easier when I looked at the steadily declining visitor count, probably caused by better offerings from other websites that also compare prices to other stores than only Steam. At some point one starts to ask themselves if this is still all worth the trouble. And sometimes you just have to let go.
I hope you can understand my decision to close the website. I am especially sorry to all who liked and used the niche features that are not available on most other websites.
Best regards,
Pascal
info@steamprices.com
P.S. regarding the most obvious question: I have deleted all user information from the database and will not be able to satisfy requests for an export of your collected data - most notably your wishlists.
isthereanydeal.com offers price information and history graphs.
steampeek.hu lets you find similar games.
steamdb.info offers a wide variety of features.