OpenGameStats Is Shutting Down (For Now)

Hello! If you're reading this, there's a good chance you were redirected here from OpenGameStats. Unfortunately, I've made the decision to shut down the project, at least for the time being.

What started as a fun little hobby project quickly turned into a much bigger headache than I ever expected. I figured I'd explain what happened, why I'm shutting it down, and whether there's a chance it'll come back someday.

How It All Started

The idea for OpenGameStats actually came from another project of mine, Scapelikes, a website dedicated to discovering RuneScape-inspired games.

While building Scapelikes, I wanted a way to display current and historical player counts for the games listed on the site. A lot of them are multiplayer games, so being able to see whether a game's population is growing, declining, or has been practically nonexistent for the past year is pretty useful when deciding what to play.

Steam already has an API that lets you retrieve current player counts, but I wanted historical data. I wanted to be able to look back weeks, months, or even years and see how a game was doing.

I searched around for an API that could provide that information, but couldn't find anything that really fit what I needed. Sure, I could pull the current player counts from Steam and start saving them myself, but that wouldn't give me any historical information from before I started collecting it.

SteamDB was actually one of the first places I looked. They already had a massive amount of historical Steam data, but unfortunately, they didn't offer a public API to access any of it. That was a big part of why I decided to build OpenGameStats in the first place. Funny enough, it now looks like SteamDB has changed its mind and is working on an API of its own. Coincidence? I'd like to think not, but who knows! Either way, I genuinely hope they release it. If SteamDB can provide the kind of historical data I originally went looking for, then maybe OpenGameStats won't need to come back at all. And honestly, I'd be perfectly happy with that.

But back then, that API didn't exist, and I still needed the data for Scapelikes. So I went ahead and started collecting player counts from Steam myself, saving them to my own database and building up that history over time. It wasn't going to give me years of historical data overnight, but at least I'd have something to work with going forward.

But the idea stuck with me. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a public API that made all of this information available to anyone who wanted to use it?

Once I had Scapelikes in a place I was happy with, I decided to turn that idea into its own project.

And that's how OpenGameStats was born.

Things Got Out of Hand Pretty Quickly

It only took a few weeks to get the initial version of OpenGameStats up and running. I was having a good time building it, adding features, collecting data, and watching everything come together.

Then I started realizing just how much data I was dealing with.

It wasn't just player counts anymore. I was collecting all kinds of information about Steam games, tracking changes over time, caching images, and generating custom artwork for social media previews.

Before long, my web server was running out of storage. The image caching and processing alone were eating up a ridiculous amount of space.

So I upgraded the server.

Then the database started filling up.

So I upgraded that server, too.

At that point, I figured I had everything under control. I'd increased the resources, cleaned things up, and had what I thought was plenty of room to keep growing.

And for the next month or two, everything seemed fine.

Until a couple of days ago.

The Final Straw

I started noticing some of my other websites acting strangely. Pages weren't loading properly, things were failing, and something was clearly wrong.

After a few minutes of digging around, I found the problem.

The database server had run out of storage. Again.

And because I host databases for several of my projects on that server, OpenGameStats wasn't just causing problems for itself anymore. It was starting to affect my other websites, too.

That's when I decided enough was enough.

The obvious solution would be to upgrade the database server again. Throw more storage at it, pay a little more every month, and carry on.

But how many times am I going to do that?

OpenGameStats was never intended to become some massive business. It was a hobby project that I thought would be useful to other developers and gamers. I added some monetization options in the hope that, eventually, it might bring in enough money to cover its own hosting costs.

Unfortunately, that never happened. To date, OpenGameStats hasn't had a single paying customer.

And that's fine. I didn't build it expecting to get rich. But there's a pretty big difference between running a fun hobby project and continuously paying more money to store an ever-growing mountain of data that nobody is paying to access.

At some point, I have to draw the line.

Will OpenGameStats Come Back?

Maybe! I'm not ruling it out.

I still think the idea behind OpenGameStats is a good one. Having an accessible API for historical Steam player counts and other game statistics is something I personally wanted, and I imagine there are other developers out there who could find it useful, too.

The problem isn't really the idea. It's how much it costs to keep everything running.

If I bring OpenGameStats back, I'll need to rethink how the data is stored. Keeping all that historical information in a traditional database might not be the most practical or affordable approach for what I'm trying to accomplish.

Maybe some of it could be moved into compressed files, JSON, or another storage format that doesn't require continuously upgrading a database server. Maybe there's a much better solution I haven't considered yet.

I'm not sure. That's something I'll have to investigate when I have the time and motivation to revisit the project.

For now, though, I'd rather shut it down than keep throwing money at a problem that clearly needs a better solution.

Thank You for Checking It Out

If you used OpenGameStats, browsed the site, tried the API, or even just stumbled across it once, thank you. I genuinely appreciate you taking the time to check out something I built.

If you have the OpenGameStats browser extension installed, you can go ahead and uninstall it, as it won't be useful while the service is offline.

And if you're curious about what else I'm working on, you can always find my projects over at Spegal.Dev.

I have a habit of coming up with ideas, building them, and occasionally discovering that I've created a much bigger project than I originally signed up for. OpenGameStats was definitely one of those.

Maybe it'll make a comeback someday with a better system behind it. Maybe it won't. Either way, I learned quite a bit from building it, and I'm glad I gave it a shot.

Thanks again for your support, and hopefully I'll see you around on one of my other projects!