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Steam's Most Popular Games
An anonymous reader writes "The folks at Ars Technica scraped a ton of gameplay data from Steam's player profiles to provide statistics on how many people own each game, and how often it's played. For example: 37% of the ~781 million games owned by Steam users have never been played. Dota 2 has been played by almost 26 million people for a total of 3.8 billion hours. Players of CoD: Modern Warfare 2 spend six times as long in multiplayer as in single-player. This sampling gives much more precise data than we usually have about game sales rates. 'If there's one big takeaway from looking at the entirety of our Steam sales and player data, it's that a few huge ultra-hits are driving the majority of Steam usage. The vast majority of titles form a "long tail" of relative crumbs. Out of about 2,750 titles we've tracked using our sampling method, the top 110 sellers represent about half of the individual games registered to Steam accounts. That's about four percent of the distinct titles, each of which has sold 1.38 million copies or more. This represents about 50 percent of the registered sales on the service. ... about half of the estimated 18.5 billion man-hours that have been spent across all Steam games have gone toward just the six most popular titles.'"
37% of the ~781 million games owned by Steam users have never been played.
... through the crapware layer of the steam launcher.
I don't trust Valve, I paid money for the game, I will crack it and run it without their knowledge if I want to.
Oh, and there's a few I bought on sale that looked interesting but I haven't installed yet.
that Defense Grid didn't make the list, I've put over 148 hours into it and would have expected most people that own the game to have done the same. It's the only game on Steam that I have every achievement for.
Probably not a major factor to the whole study, but there are two issues for detecting the game being played by time played:
1. The time played started being recorded a couple years ago. Games played before that default to zero. For example, I put on probably hundreds of hours of Counter Strike 1.6 in High School, but it is listed as unplayed in my Steam profile
2. I didn't see how they handled game expansions, which are often listed as separate games, but they are unplayed. For Borderlands, I have four additional "games" with no playtime
I have severa games that I never "purchased" that ended up in my Library. I dont know how they ended up in my Library, but I never paid a cent for them. I researched the issue (I wanted to clean up my library) and found that there was no way to remove them. Also I learned that many other people had the same issue of games magically appearing in their library. Because of this, I am going to assume that the numbers they used for their findings are invalid.
The 'Hours Played' is a horrible metric. I've left Civ V running for days when I play in the evening, but don't bother quitting when I go to bed and work in the morning, then come home and play for an hour or two in the evening. 6 hours real play, 72 recorded as 'time played'. Same for other games.
The premise is a non-starter anyway; how many games do Steam users own? The answer is none. The fact that people can be confused about this should tell you that Valve isn't doing enough to tell users what the terms are.
Still, interesting statistics. The methodology is messed up because Valve only started tracking time with the current system in 2009 and I would've figured that even without that factor, more games would've gone unplayed. The achievements are generally how you tell game completion, so if you look at the "start the game" achievement, you can tell how many have never done any playing. Those ratios are generally in the 50-80% range, so this is probably surprisingly accurate.
Came in publisher bundles that represented a way to get a bunch of other games I wanted for a lot less than buying them individually would cost. I know there's a racing game I got in one of those that I have never installed and never will just because racing games aren't my cuppa.
Does Valve know any time I've played such and such games, on which servers and so on? Are data anonymized when surveys or such sociological studies are made?
It is one troubling aspect, or the biggest one. DRM philosophical arguments almost do not matter. When Amazon knows what books you've read, even down to the last page you've viewed for every book (that was in the news about recently) you have a situation that goes further than what the science fiction books and movies from the 60s and 70s and earlier anticipated.
Stuff like Day of Defeat would often appear on free weekend demos. It's hardly surprising that people kicked off a download and never got around to playing it. Same for other titles which are multiplayer modes, tech demos and so forth. I also expect the likes of Humble Bundle has meant people have gotten download codes for games they've redeemed but never bothered to run. I know I've a few games in my list which are like that.
How many of the "millions and millions" of iphone/android apps have only been used a few times. I seem to recall at one point there were about a hundred "flashlight apps" for iphone alone..
I do not use Steam and never will. I set up an account for my son so he could buy a game. After downloading it it would not run and gave an obscure error message. I complained to Steam who said it was the game developer's problem. No response from game developers. So I complained to Paypal and blocked payment. Then I worked out the game needed a better video card, bought one fixed the problem and removed the block on payment. Then Steam blocked access to the Steam Account so my son could not play the game he paid $50 for. Steam ignored my emails yet again and finally unblocked the account a few days later. There was no communications, no apology, nothing. Result: Neither my son nor I will never buy anything that requires Steam again (this applies to CIV 5 that I wanted to purchase). I will not deal with companies that deny access to systems and who are unaccountable for their actions.
Because I'm neither surprised that almost everybody has a bundled copy of Ricochet, nor that basically nobody plays it.
Hell, nobody played it when WON was still online, and that was over a decade ago.
Bingo. I have dozens of Steam games I've never played, most of which came as part of a bigger bundle that was cheaper than just buying the games I wanted from that bundle. So this doesn't surprise me at all.
So, are these the assholes that keep bringing Steam down?
This is true of anything that requires a license or title. You never own your house nor car for the same reasons. You simply paid for the "right" to possess. When it comes to valuable and necessary property this is a big deal we should all be concerned about... when it comes to video games.. yawn. Nobody is going to care until property rights are restored on things that actually matter.
The interesting part is how successful those smaller games are in terms of sales numbers. Steam's been a good outlet for small indie projects lately, and some data showing the odds of success on the platform (and maybe some useful tips as to why certain games were successful) is key, because it will help illustrate how likely you are to succeed on the platform.
As much as I like GOG or other non-DRM sites, Steam still has an exponentially bigger reach.
That 37% sounds about right for me. I've purchased a couple Humble Bundles for one or two specific games, and in the process acquired a number of other games which I never play, and never intend to play. I'm probably not alone.
According to steam:
Out of 2,750 titles tracked 4% were interesting/playable to gamers using steam.
I wonder why people are discouraged about buying games without playing them first.
That 4%, the top 110 games, have made approximately $8,000,000,000. And that is just 50% of the sales numbers, "represents about 50 percent of the registered sales on the service".
It doesn't sound like piracy is making much of a impact to me.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
The hours played metric on steam games fluctuates wildly for no apparent reason whether you're playing a game or not. I've seen games that I've barely played an hour of claim hundreds of hours one day and .2 hours another, without even being installed during that time.
My 12 year old son got VAC banned recently. His 13 year old cousin convinced him to change the name of a file to something that matched a cheat client signature. BAM! Permanant ban. No recourse available. Valve is judge, jury and exocutioner. All games bought with this account are now unable to connect to VAC secured servers from now on. I'm not happy with my son or nephew, but kids do stupid things sometimes. That Valve are willing and able to do this disturbs me greatly. What percentage of people who get VAC banned are perfectly innocent? 1%? 10%? Too fucking bad for them apparently. Valve is taking a tough stance on cheaters so you can just eat shit...but don't forget to create another account and buy all your games again!
Fucking corporations...they'll fuck you every time. Don't trust any of them!
Are you sure you're making a profit? Leaving your comp on all the time to accrue playtime hours costs power, though I'm not sure how much it would be costing you. When looking at dollars and cents balancing though, I think it should factor in.
Good. I love this game !
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