Methodology
Source and schedule
A scheduled job asks the Steam store for every hardware package in each of the 31 countries where Valve sells on Steam, every 10 minutes. It makes one request per country with all packages in it. The answers are stored together with the time of the check. Nothing is estimated or filled in by hand.
Prices come from the Steam store as well, at build time. A price is only shown when its format matches the store currency for that country, so a page never shows a guessed currency.
How a status is decided
Each package gets a status from the fields Steam returns, checked in this order:
allow_purchase_in_country: false means Steam does not sell the product in that country: Not sold here.requires_reservation: true means the product is sold through reservations. Then reservation_not_allowed, position_is_waitlist, queue_in_waitlist and high_pending_orders decide between Reservations open, Waitlist and Out of stock.high_pending_orders: true on a normal product means Steam has turned the buy button off while it works through orders: Out of stock.account_restricted_from_purchasing: true means Steam is not selling it right now: Out of stock.inventory_available: true, when none of the above apply, means In stock. Anything else is Out of stock.
A product with several models takes the best status of its models. In stock beats Reservations open, which beats Waitlist. The rules are in public/stock-status.js in the source code.
History and freshness
A change is only recorded when the status differs from the last one for that product and country, so the history lists real transitions, not every check. Product pages are rebuilt after a change. Each page shows the time of the last check, and the history keeps the latest 50 changes per product and country.
Known limits
- Stock that appears and sells out between two checks is missed.
- If Steam does not answer for a country, that country has no current status until the next check that works. Its history is kept.
- Steam does not say where you are in a queue, so the tracker cannot either.
- Komodo stock in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan is not checked. Those pages link to Komodo.