Dashboard Stories

Monitoring my family’s Steam player stats

This is a fun dashboard to capture some Steam player statistics using the WebAPI plugin. Now I can find out how long my kids have been online, how many friends they have though they’ve never met in person, and what they have achieved without even leaving their room 🙄

Josip Dlaka

Director of Engineering, SquaredUp

Dashboard preview

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Challenge

There’s so much data available on Steam games and players that it’s hard to have clear visibility of the most important information. A lot of the data is fragmented and only accessible through the console. For example, data on time spent playing is only available within the context of a game. I could get information about how long a particular game was played but it is not possible to find out how much time is spent across all games without a pen, paper, calculator, and lots of patience.

Solution

SquaredUp excels by allowing you to combine and visualize data from multiple data sources in a meaningful way, so I built this aesthetically pleasing dashboard to get an overview of key Steam player metrics in my house. I’ve looked up what Web API Steam provided and, using our new swanky Web API data source integration, I’ve got all the data needed to start creating some pretty tiles.

Using our new tile editor, this was a child’s play. I was particularly impressed by SQL Analytics, which is now built in our tile editor. Whenever I needed to tweak or customize data in some specific way, I was amazed at how easy and seamlessly this could be achieved using SQL Analytics. Only my creativity and the sky were the limits to what can be accomplished with available data in SquaredUp dashboards.

With a quick glance at the new dashboard, I can now see player status, status of other players my kids interact with the most, keep an eye on the total time spent playing, and see key information about the most played game.

All the data is captured using Steam Web APIs that have been well documented. From here, it was a very easy job connecting to SquaredUp using our Web API plugin.

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Dashboard walk-through

Here's a quick run through of all the tiles on the Steam dashboard.

Player name – this tile uses the status block to show the main player’s username and their online status (red if offline and green if online).

Top 5 friends – this tile is also using status blocks to show the usernames and online statuses for the top 5 Steam users that the main player interacts with most.

Games owned – the metric tile shows the total number of games owned by the Steam user.

Last 2 weeks’ play time – here's where I get to see the total number of days/hours/minutes the the player has spent playing games over the last two weeks. Insightful!

Total play time - plus, I get the total number of days/hours/minutes the user has spent playing since creating a Steam account.

Steam logo – I wanted to add some graphics to this Steam dashboard so I used an image tile to show the Steam logo, indicating where the data was captured.

Avatar – the avatar image tile is important to show a player’s visual identity.

Top games – to check which games were most played, there's a stacked bar graph visualization showing top 5 games based on time spent playing them.

Achievements – these gauge tiles cover some of the in-game achievements for 'Counter Strike: Global Offensive'. As there are lots of achievements being captured in games, the player can select a few of the most important ones to them to display on dashboard. What's really cool is that, by switching on monitoring on these tiles, the player can set thresholds on these achievements to indicate RAG status to visualize how well they're doing.

Community announcements – this is a table tile displaying latest news feed for the 'Counter Strike: Global Offensive' game so that the player can stay up to date with latest community activities.

In the future

There is a lot more that can be added to this dashboard. For example, more game-specific data and more community information. In fact, I could easily see this project growing into multiple dashboards - one for each game. Another avenue to explore would be to use a health rollup over some key game stats that would nicely fit into our new global view. Then you could see RAG statuses for each game and drill down to a specific game dashboard to get more details.