Why App Engine?  What is App Engine? Let me quote Google:

Google App Engine enables you to build and host web apps on the same systems that power Google applications. App Engine offers fast development and deployment; simple administration, with no need to worry about hardware, patches or backups; and effortless scalability.

Having a highly scalable system is something SteamCalculator might need in the future. I’ll keep you informend.

The current version is 0.3.2 and is also used by the SteamCalculator.

If you’re planing to use the SteamCalculator-Scripts for your project, let me know so I can add a link to your website.

Update: Half-Life Lost Coast bug is fixed.

Thanks to all for reporting!

This website was created by nova form tfportal.de using the same Perl scripts, as the SteamCalculator does.
SteamPrices.com compares games and packages prices on the Steam store with other currencies.

For example: Browsing the Steam store as an US citizen you can buy Need for Speed Undercover for $9.99 USD. Browsing it as an European citizen (click) it’s price suddenly jumps to 19.99 € (~ $27.30 USD) for the same game. That is about ~ 175% more an European has to pay than an American. OK, I know, we are missing taxes here, which are added to the European prices already. But still, if we take a closer look and subtract 19% (German VAT), we sill need to pay ~ 16.80 € ($22.90 USD), which is ~ 129% more for the same product. Some people call that a “rip off”.

Pointing this out, it is not surprisingly, that nova’s announcement, to his new website, got deleted on the Steam forums, after a few minutes. It is kind of sad, as he is just showing the truth.

Anyway, nova and me are now partners and supporting each other by working on some bugs together. This again will help us to improve the SteamCalculator as well.

Now, go ahead, and check out SteamPrices.com. Tell your friends, tweet it and post feedback if you like. I know some of you have been waiting for such a page already a long time.

I had to try it myself :

GET http://api.steampowered.com/ISteamNews/GetNewsForApp/v0001/?appid=20&count=1&maxlength=300&format=xml HTTP/1.1
host: api.steampowered.com
Accept: text/html,*/*;q=0.9
Accept-Encoding: gzip,identity,*;q=0
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8,*;q=0.7
Connection: keep-alive
User-Agent: Valve/Steam HTTP Client 1.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:29:57 GMT
expires: Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:30:17 GMT
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 1796
Via: 1.1 api.steampowered.com
Connection: close

This request “GetNewsForApp” depending on the appID you enter. The arguments are pretty mush self-explanatory.

Another request, that was found by ‘DarkProcessor’, returns achievements:

http://api.steampowered.com/ISteamUserStats/GetGlobalAchievementPercentagesForApp/v0001/?gameid=550&format=xml

These are the only two requests we know so fare. However, it is likely to expect more in the future, because I do not believe Valve will keep the API for themselves.