Gameplay.Science vs Steam Wrapped

Gameplay.Science is an open-source web platform for independent research on video games using behavior data donated by players. It is designed to support studies without requiring direct participation from game platforms. Players can contribute digital trace data through Steam or Discord connections, account integrations such as Steam or Xbox, or GDPR requests. Account linking lets a participant sign in and authorize automatic access to gameplay data. UK and EU players can request data held by a gaming company under GDPR and share it with researchers. The project aims to cover how long people play, what they do in games, and who they interact with. A study using the platform describes Steam authentication through OpenID, public Steam gameplay details, and hourly collection of each game’s incremental playtime. That study says data was stored on encrypted servers accessible only to the research team. Steam and Xbox are listed as supported ecosystems.

Steam Wrapped is a free Millennium plugin that adds a gaming activity dashboard inside Steam for Windows. It appears in Steam’s Store navigation and requires Steam for Windows with Millennium installed. Date filters cover this month, last month, the last three months, this year, and custom ranges. Summaries show playtime, games played, achievements, and favorite genre, plus most played game, longest session, peak play time, and a 24-hour activity histogram. The plugin tracks sessions locally, displays live playtime for the current game, and links recent games and achievements to Steam Library pages. A high-resolution PNG export is available. Sessions, achievements, artwork references, and cached metadata remain in local Steam storage. Game App IDs are requested from Valve’s public app-details endpoint for artwork and genre data, without Steam credentials. Local history can be cleared; removing the plugin may not remove Steam WebUI storage.