Who is behind SteamDB?
xPaw (Steam, Twitter, Website) made and hosts the website you're staring at right now, he also developed an application that takes store prices, and shows them on this website.
Marlamin (Steam, Twitter, Website) hosts and develops the applications that take the Steam information and output it to something we can show you on the website. He also made the predecessor to SteamDB, CDR parser.
Origin of SteamDB *giggles*
Marlamin originally made the CDR parser as a hobby project to give some insight into the Steam database. After a while, Valve slowly started to phase out the original CDR system, and the CDR parser was very quickly becoming defunct.
xPaw contacted Marlamin through Steam on whether he wanted to work together to make a replacement for the CDR parser, which they slowly but gradually began developing.
xPaw started developing frontend pages with example data, and Marlamin started to develop applications to interact with the Steam network. He initially started work in C++ with much help from Open Steamworks, but eventually switched to C# with help from SteamKit2.
Why do we do what we do?
We do what we do because we love information, and making it accessible for the everyday Joe. Surprisingly enough, we rarely receive negative comments from developers. This is because all the information we display on this website, is gathered from the Steam network and websites using a normal Steam account.
We have had discussions with some developers though, which always end up in the developer being more careful in what they add to the Steam registry, as they often did not know it was public information. Some of you might think of this as a negative thing leading to less information in the Steam database.
We don't want to annoy developers with information shown on this site. We merely want to warn them that the information is indeed public, and Valve's system is far from fool-proof in regards to protecting their information. Even better, we notify Valve when we find new methods of gathering information before using said methods and publishing the results.
However, to this day we have not received a single response from Valve, and they only seem to patch our methods after we use them to make information public.
An example here is the Game Hub debacle from a while back. Or more recently: Game schemas of which we told Valve about on March 7th, implemented March 19th, and Valve fixed it on March 20th.