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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.
Especially since the trading cards.
I often buy a humble bundle, load up the games, leave them running to "earn" the badges, shut them down, uninstall them. (Then sell the cards, get Steam Wallet cash, buy more games, get more badges, etc....)
You do realize, with a good number of games, you can register your 'owened' CD registration number with steam, and then have your game available on your steam account on any computer you are at, without needing to dig out that CD again, right?
so if you went to bestbuy, bought the (physical) game box, took it home, installed it and figured out it wouldn't run, would you have called your c/c company to withhold the payment to bestbuy until you were able to run the game? What does Valve have anything to do with a game working or not working? It's not that physical stores allow you to take back opened software nowadays either...
What does Valve have anything to do with a game working or not working?
Precisely. I don't think I have purchased or even seen a game in recent years that did not come with a listing of prerequisite hardware/software.
If you entered into a purchase, received the goods, then stopped payment, I think Steam have every right to put a hold on the account you used until further information was received. What were you expecting, an apology from them because you didn't read the hardware prerequisites for a product you purchased?
If you don't dick them around, they provide a pretty damned good service.
If I had a DeLorean... I would probably only drive it from time to time.
"Lost Coast" is a tech demo for HDR lighting, not an expansion. I'm pretty sure you don't have to own HL2 to play it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
All games bought with this account are now unable to connect to VAC secured servers from now on.
This is actually not true. VAC bans are specific to a single game, or at worst a group of similar games that use the same engine (for example, multiplayer games using the Source engine).