steam-mcp

Steam market intelligence for AI agents — an MCP server that gives your coding assistant live Steam data: app search, player-count trends, store details, review mining, and news digests.

Built for game developers and community managers who want Steam answers inside their IDE conversation instead of tab-switching to store pages.

Why

Steam's public APIs are fragmented (store search, appdetails, user stats) and none of them keep player-count history — the single most useful signal for launch planning. steam-mcp stitches the surfaces together behind one tool set and pairs them with a companion backend that snapshots player counts every 30 minutes, so your agent can answer "how is the game actually doing" with real numbers.

Install

# from npm
npm install -g @playtide-studios/steam-mcp
steam-mcp

or from source:

git clone https://github.com/Playtide-studios/steam-mcp.git
cd steam-mcp
npm install
npm start

Requires Node 26+. Zero runtime dependencies — the server talks plain HTTP/JSON-RPC over stdio.

Tools

Tool	What it does
steam_search_apps	Resolve a game name to appids via Steam store search
steam_get_app_overview	One-call health check: players, reviews, price, release, genres, latest news
steam_get_store_details	Full store listing: pricing per region, platforms, DLC count, metacritic
steam_get_app_reviews	Review mining with recency/sentiment/keyword filters + representative quotes
steam_get_game_news	News and patch-note digests, summary or full text
steam_get_player_trend	Player-count history with min/max/avg, week-over-week change, and a plain-language insight line
steam_get_market_pulse	Curated market digest for game developers: Steam trends, live-ops patterns, competitor notes

Client configuration

stdio (Claude Desktop / Cursor / any MCP client):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "steam": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/path/to/steam-mcp/src/index.ts"]
    }
  }
}

Streamable HTTP:

npm run start:http   # serves MCP on http://localhost:8788/mcp

Ready-to-edit client configs live in examples/.

Configuration

Variable	Default	Purpose
STEAM_MCP_BACKEND_URL	https://api.playtide.dev	Companion backend base URL — hosted beta by default; override to self-host. Must be https:// unless loopback
STEAM_MCP_BACKEND_KEY	—	Backend API key (optional; the hosted beta is open)
STEAM_MCP_REMOTE_MANIFEST	0	Opt in to fetching tool descriptions from the backend each boot
STEAM_MCP_TIMEOUT_MS	10000	Per-request timeout to Steam or the backend

Everything else is zero-config: tool schemas are pinned to the packaged manifest (see src/fallback-manifest.json).

Data provenance & safety

• Store search, details, reviews, and news come directly from Steam's public endpoints at request time — nothing is scraped ahead or cached on disk.
• Trends and the market digest come from the companion backend.
• All free-text fetched from the internet (reviews, news bodies) is treated as data, never instructions — tool descriptions tell the model the same.
• The server sends no telemetry anywhere. The only outbound calls are the Steam endpoints you asked about and the backend you configured.

The companion backend

Trend and pulse data come from the steam-mcp companion backend — a small Express + Postgres service that snapshots player counts for every tracked app every 30 minutes.

• Hosted backend (open beta — the default): installs use https://api.playtide.dev out of the box; no key needed during beta. To pin it explicitly:

  STEAM_MCP_BACKEND_URL=https://api.playtide.dev npm start
  

• Self-hosted: the backend is a standard docker-compose Postgres + API stack; set STEAM_MCP_BACKEND_URL to your instance. See docs/TROUBLESHOOTING.md for connectivity help.

Troubleshooting

Backend unreachable, HTTPS requirement errors, deprecated_client on trend calls, rate limits — see docs/TROUBLESHOOTING.md.

Contributing

Issues and PRs are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md. Bug reports that include the failing tool call JSON get fixed first.

License

MIT © Playtide Studios. Steam is a trademark of Valve Corporation; this project is not affiliated with Valve.