Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Same here, but for performance reasons. Steam is extremely heavy on OS X, I avoid it if I can launch the game by itself.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
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.
I've got a WHACK of steam games bought as part of bundles (humble bundles, steam bundles etc...)
I bought a steam halflife bundle at some point... I've played HalfLife 2 to completion, but have never played HL2 deathmatch, hl2 ep1, hl2 ep2, hl2 lost coast, hl deathmatch:source, hl blue shift, hl opposing force, hl source.
I bought an ID pack at some point. I've got 2 Hexens, Hexen2 and Heretic that I've never played, with 3 quakes, 3 quake 2s, and 2 quake 3s. So far I've only played Quake II.
I bought the Sid Meier humble bundle which came with Civ5 a bunch of its expansions, and Civ IV, and III ... I've played Civ V a bit so far... but have 8 separate entries for Civ IV in my steam library, along with Civ III that I haven't touched. Along with Pirates! and Railroads. I'll probably play Pirates! at some point... who knows about the rest.
I've got and Sam & Max set, that I'm part way through... so 3 titles I haven't touched out of 5.
I've got 5 episodes of Back to the Future that came with another humble bundle that was worth the price of entry to me for something else. I might try it at some point, who knows... its pretty low on my priority list though.
I wouldn't be surprised that others who are avid supporters of humble bundles have lots of games they've yet to try.
etc, etc, etc.
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 thought HL2 ep2 was awesome, and ep1 was fun also, I'd suggest checking them out (only 20 hours if you milk them) if you enjoyed HL2
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.
I've got 76 hours on that one, and steam says I've got 57 of 87 of the acheivements. Honestly. I'm impressed that you completed it to 100% some of the expansion pack stuff is pretty brutal.
I think the most interesting thing though about the defense grid stats is 'first blood' ... only 87% of the people steam registers as having played killed even a single alien. So that's 13% who started up the game, and then exited it without doing anything.
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...
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.
The first one exploded and blew my hand off. The next one killed my dog and sterilized my nuts.
Overall I was left with a really bad feeling about all Vavle products, which obviously must all have similar defects. Anecdotes by unverifiable semi-anonymous internet posters prove that to be true.
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.
Wow, I quite the HL franchise halfway through Ep 2 it stank so badly. All subjective I guess.
I still go back and play HL1 every couple of years, followed by OpFor and BlueShift. I think that was the peak of single player FPS gaming, and it's been gradually downhill ever since as focus shifted to multiplayer, or incorporated RPG elements. (Quake 4 was also pretty good, but it was a deliberate throwback to those days).
Not that I hate FPS RPGs, but it's a different genre.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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...
If he had gotten it from Best Buy he'd have basic consumer rights to refund, a working product, etc. enforced by policy and executed by a human (be it a sales associate, manager, whoever).
If he had gotten it from best Buy he would have received actual human interaction when first complaining about it. Best Buy may be a joke and the Geek Squad may be a ripoff, but the mere presence of a human being who has some idea of how to troubleshoot shit, or at least whose job it is to keep customers happy, is about 87 miles ahead of Steam's "support".
Steam support simply doesn't exist unless you threaten to issue a chargeback or sue. No human at Valve even SEES your support ticket until 2 automated "solutions" are generated and spit out - 1 blaming your ISP and 1 telling you to delete clientregistry.blob or reinstall Steam. After that they blame the developer and close your ticket.
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.
Play Pirates, it was fun in the original "boot up your XT with the floppy" version, good in the mid-90s with "Pirates Gold" and the latest version is pretty much the same deal with better graphics. One of the better games i've ever played.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Agreed. I really like the idea of Steam as well as their customer service and general philosophy. However I dread loading it up on OS X because it's such a bloated piece of shit. I wish you could just shut it down once the game was running.
I noticed things like "Half Life 2: Lost Coast" is very high on the owned by unplayed list. But I think people got that for free as part of HL2 at some point? I know I've got some HL2 add on that I've never touched (too disappointed that it wasn't a full game with an actual ending, so I'm not continuing that franchise). I think I have one or two other things that are in that category.
Also left 4 dead 2 was given away for free not too long ago, though it has a much smaller percentage of "not played". I suspect people grabbed it when it was free without even knowing much about it, tried it a little bit, then stopped because it wasn't their favorite style of game.
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.
It doesn't sound like piracy is making much of a impact to me.
And it likely never did. It was a big bunch of scare mongering, "Oh no the pirates are cutting hard core into our profits!!!!"
There is a basic fact about piracy... most people who pirate software fall into two categories:
1. The group that bought the software, but wants to remove it's DRM.
2. The group that will NEVER buy the software, regardless of price or DRM.
I think Steam proves this. Piracy is still alive and well, yes? So it wasn't a problem of accessibility. Steam erased accessibility issues. Bottom line: Pirates are likely never to be your customers, no matter what.
Play Pirates, it was fun in the original "boot up your XT with the floppy"
Yeah, that's the one I have a LOT of nostalgia for and why I expect to play it. :) I've read they've largely kept the original style of the game intact... right down to ship combat and the fencing. Looking forward to it.
Wow, I quite the HL franchise halfway through Ep 2 it stank so badly. All subjective I guess.
I enjoyed HL2 but found it incredibly linear in a way that even, say, the original Doom wasn't. I haven't tried ep1/ep2 but do plan to at some point.
I still go back and play HL1 every couple of years, followed by OpFor and BlueShift. I think that was the peak of single player FPS gaming
Hmm. I really enjoyed Serious Sam 3 BFE which is pretty recent, albeit also a throwback to old school FPS. That you mentioned Quake 4 is surprising, I quite enjoyed that one too... but it wasn't generally well reviewed and I agree with some of the criticisms of it. Duke Forever also had its moments too if you like classic single player FPS, and even the strip club level, which i originally thought was beyond stupid... I've since gained a healthy appreciation for just how much of a parody that level is of similarly interruptive and pointless fetch-mission mechanics as-seen in other games -- that I now sincerely believe that the level's stupidity itself is deliberately intended as a commentary on the game mechanic itself.
To me, its a deceptively smart and cleverly crafted game wrapped in a veil of vulgarity and stupidity. Or maybe its just vulgar and stupid... but I don't think so.
If you don't dick them around, they provide a pretty damned good service.
Until you want to sell anything you purchased from them, and that if you're in Europe, that restriction is illegal and they're about to be dragged through the EU courts over it.
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.
"It told me the game required Windows XP or better so I installed Linux."
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).
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.
Lost Coast is a graphics demo. Unless you are benchmarking your card or want to play a maybe 15 minute playable level, it's pretty useless. Calling it a game is sort of a lie.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
To me the point when HL2 shit the bed is when they pulled a Bioshock Infinite and fell in love with a gimmick...the gravity gun. In HL2 the GG was just another weapon, used in a couple of spots but other than those spots it really wasn't required. What did we get for EP 1? Gravitypaloza. By the time I was being forced to shoot basketballs at striders I was just sick of the stupid gravity gun, just as I got sick of infinite shoving that damned skyhook under my nose going "Isn't this neato"? Sure it was, before you BECAME ANNOYING ABOUT IT!!
As for so many games not played? Bundles, simple as that. You can get so many bundles on Steam that you soon end up with dozens of games and you only have so many hours in the day so...there ya go. Between the big Steam sales and Humble Bundles I probably got a good 50 games in a couple months, just not enough time to play them all before the next killer bundle comes along.
Finally as for Steam being "bloated" on OSX.....ever stop to think that OSX simply isn't very well suited as a gaming platform? Because on Windows you are looking at maybe 60Mb (I have Raptr AND Steam running and barely am using 100Mb) and from what I understand the Steam for Linux also runs quite well, which leaves OSX looking as the culprit from where I sit.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
They're probably happy about that. They'd prefer not to do business with customer who deny access to payment and who are unaccountable for their actions.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Oh, yeah. DNF is special. But it's such a unique gem that it doesn't represent anything going on when it was released. Balls of steel!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You nailed it. I found EP 1 tolerable, despite being overly gimmicked, but it did use up my patience. EP 2 was just the camel that broke the straw's back.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
People are willing to spend $2000 on a gaming PC and then will pirate a $30 piece of software, so obviously these are people who are willing to pay for games on some level...the idea that nobody pirates as an alternative to buying strikes me as ludicrous, because the people who are most into piracy today are the sort of people who spent all their money on computer games a decade ago.
And it's believable to me that if all "Game of Thrones" torrents became unavailable, more than a few people would be motivated to subscribe to HBO.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Right now, the three most pirated games on piratebay are goatsimulator, Minecraft, and Sims 3. Goat Simulator is $10 off steam (very easy), Sims3 is $20 off steam (very easy) Minecraft is any easy purchase as well. What do you want, it's $1 and they mail the DVD to your house on a silk pillowcase?
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Best Buy would have just told him no returns on open box software no matter how irate he got.
Would mod up if I had points. VAC bans are game specific. Also, VAC scans memory and uses file signatures, not names, to determine hacking programs. Try trolling harder.
Best Buy would have made a decent effort to please an upset customer by offering free Geek Squad support to the point of diagnosis / asking Chris to look into it (instead of Frank, who's just does sales), but not free repairs/upgrades. Best Buy would have jumped at the opportunity to upsell him some Geek Squad if possible after that first assessment.
Regardless of it being open, he can return it and get an exchange for the same item easily in the US, and for store credit fairly easily in the US.
He can return for a full refund in whatever form of payment he initially made in many countries, including the one he's in.
Nonreturnable Items: Opened computer software, movies, music and video games can be exchanged for the identical item but cannot be returned for a refund
He can get an identical copy of the software, thats it. No refund. Why? Because people buy software, return the disk, but burn the CD key so it's no longer valid.
Also, you've never worked at a retail store's computer repair before. Its "We can look into it... at a discounted rate" or if they do look into it for free, its put on low priority and put off until someone finally gets around to it.
I don't feel the slightest amount of guilt torrenting Game of Thrones episodes. This is accessibility issue. I am HAPPY to pay for it. I already have Seasons 1 through 3 on Bluray. As soon as they put 4 on Bluray, I'll buy it too. Not going to stop me from watching the torrents, what difference does it make? I'll be paying for it, as soon as they let me.
But there is no way I'm wasting hundreds of dollars on a cable+HBO service I don't want or need. I don't even LIKE television stations, of any kind. I just want content I choose. Game of Thrones needs to be available for streaming on their site to anyone willing to pay a nominal fee. I think some where around $1 or $2 would be reasonable. Or maybe a 'subscription' to the series for $10 per season? I dunno. I do know it's an accessibility issue.
But I'm not worried either, these dinosaurs of broadcast television will switch over to a better way of offering content on a pick and choose level. Just takes time.
Good. I love this game !
You've already done Acquaintances with Baby Hazel? Baby Hazel is a little girl, and every day is a new adventure! You the need to help in these adventures. For example, when playing outside in the garden can help to grow vegetables. But there are many other adventures of Baby Hazel where you can help. In the kitchen, on the beach, the dentist, at Christmas, at Disneyland. Have fun with all these types of Baby Hazel games!