Steam History Archiver

Steam is a place where I have spent a sizable amount of money over the years. At one point I got curious how much that would have been in total, how and where I exactly I spent it, and what other statistics I’d be able to glean from the Steam website.

So I decided to write myself a little tool capable of scanning all that data and generating reports about it. It is capable of scanning the Steam store purchase history, the license activation history, the Community Market transaction history, as well as the trading and gifting histories. It then filters them by calendar year, generates fancy tables and does some minor data aggregation. I file away the yearly PDF just in case I ever want to feel guilty about my spending habits.

The level of detail in the report is pretty extensive. Each store transaction is listed with the date, the items, the cost and payment method used as well as the transaction ID. License activations are likewise complete with the date, activation type, item titles and package IDs. Market transactions show the transaction ID, date, item name and ID, and the name of the buyer/seller. The gifting and trading histories are also complete with dates, names and item titles.

This is yet another project where I had high hopes for making it public, knowing that this is the kind of tool that many Steam power users would definitely enjoy. I don’t fully remember the whole list of issues that dissuaded me from that plan, but I think the pain of currency conversions and currency parsing played a role. It would also be a major undertaking to make this add-on work for other languages, since it works entirely by web-scraping the logged-in Steam account. Come to think of it, it probably violates parts of Steam’s terms of service as well.