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.

Related MCP server: Steam MCP Server

Install

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

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:8791/mcp

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

Configuration

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.212.147.241.73.sslip.io out of the box; no key needed during beta. To pin it explicitly:

  STEAM_MCP_BACKEND_URL=https://api.212.147.241.73.sslip.io 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.

Auto-update

At boot the server checks the vendor update channel for a newer release and, if one exists, applies it in place and relaunches — the same "keep my tools current" behavior package managers give you, without a package manager.

• Every replaced file is stamped with a visible [AUTO-UPDATED] header (version transition, timestamp, source) and apply events are appended to update-log.jsonl.

• Disable it: STEAM_MCP_AUTO_UPDATE=0. Pin a different channel: STEAM_MCP_UPDATE_ORIGIN=<url>.

• Security notes and the threat model: SECURITY.md.

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.