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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.'"
Same here, but for performance reasons. Steam is extremely heavy on OS X, I avoid it if I can launch the game by itself.
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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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.