Steamdb tech stack for Steam games
Aug 16. EDIT: Added a correction on the way steamdb collect data on engines. Thanks to René Rampin for the information
Steamdb and Lars Doucet (The dev behind gamedatacrunch) teamed up for a project trying "to automatically detect game engines & tech used in all the games on Steam." - Lars Doucet
steamdb.info/tech shows the number of games published, among other things, using specific game engines.
How do they do it?
They detect filenames in every steam project:
Every app on Steam is associated with a number of file depots. For each app on Steam, SteamDB will run scripts over all the filenames in all of its depots. Note that it is filenames, not files. These scripts only scan the names of the files, not the data they contain.
And they also look for a .pck file with the following rules:
This is a really long and annoying check. Basically we have two things to look for:
1. A single .pck file named exactly "data.pck", and NO other pck files
2. For every executable, a correspondingly named pck file, and no other pck files
privatestaticfunctionIsEngineGodot( array$Files ) : bool
{ ... }
And this is the snippet of code detecting Godot games:
Godot = (?:^|/)project\.godot$
It's still in the preliminary stages, so the numbers are not to be taken as the absolute truth, but damn!
Godot sits in eighth place, with 314 games (313 discounting the Godot Engine Steam page).
(If you go into the Godot section, it will show 415 entries instead of 314.
I'm not sure what's that about. For now, I'll be sticking to the 314 number, just to be safe)
To put this number into some sort of perspective: So far, on Steam, the list I had (mostly taken directly from this list) contains only around 60 games. That's 253 fewer games than this new database has.
Suffice to say, I'm stoked. This will be the list I'll use from now on when talking about Godot games on Steam.
I haven't had a chance to properly look at all the games yet. I'm going to start this weekend and make an issue out of it (after the Gotm.io's issue next week).
📰 Godot news round-up
- GameMaker Studio is moving to a subscription model - Big yikes. Only after days after Unity required a pro license to publish on consoles, did this new "let's stick to free and open source" piece of news arrived with quite a bit of noise.
You can probably guess what the reaction was from a large chunk of developers. Godot name was floating all around after the announcement:
I've been using GameMaker for most of my life, since version 5.3. Feel like this could be close to the end for their relevance.
When my son gets older, I'll just teach him Godot. - samwise970 on r/GameDev
A user also posted their GameMaker to Godot dictionary, for GM devs transitioning to Godot:
coppolaemilio- Cassete Beats' behind the curtain - A design doc meets game dev post-mortem. Definitely worth the read from a couple of Godot developers working on a 3D game
Hey folks! We wanted to show off a bit of how Cassette Beasts operates “under the hood”. Putting together a game like this with only two full-time developers is no easy feat, so we wanted to show a bit of our process, and how we’re able to use technology and software to put it all together!
- User YukkiTimmy's tool to split up tilemaps/images into tileset/tiles - The title says it all.
- Github Link
- Itch Link
- Bittersweet Birthday - A Game of Heart & Horror indiegogo gampaign is live - $7,000 USD already collected and 27 days left on the campaign (aiming for $23,000 USD)
If you have anything you want to share with the Godot development community please let me know by sending an email to contact@godotes.com