Report: 37% of purchased Steam games are never played
A study of Steam community members' playing history reveals that an estimated 37% of games are owned but not played.
If you’ve ever felt ashamed of games you’ve picked up but never played, at least you can rest assured you aren’t alone. A study into Steam playing habits has found that more than a third of all games purchased through the service have never been loaded up even once.
An extensive Ars Technica (via GameSpot) report combed through 172 million Steam community IDs over the course of two months, and some of the results are surprising. 36.9% of purchased games have never been loaded, while another 17% have been played for less than an hour. The study credits generous Steam sales or bundling for this statistic, noting that many users go in with the best intentions of getting around to all the games they pick up on the cheap but those tend to fall by the wayside.
The statistics on the games that are most played are revealing as well. The top two are the free-to-play Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2. Paid games seem to have a higher estimated number of people who own the game but have not played it. The closest in that regard is Half-Life 2, which has nearly as many non-playing owners (3.9 million) as players (4.1 million).
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Steve Watts posted a new article, Report: 37% of purchased Steam games are never played.
A study of Steam community members' playing history reveals that an estimated 37% of games are owned but not played.-
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Yup. My logged time on S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is only 33 minutes, but I've played at least 80 hours of that game.
Half-Life 2 and the various episodes have no listed time either, but that was one of the first things I ever played on Steam. I'm guessing that quite a few of the 3.9 million who supposedly never played it simply did so when the game was new and haven't played since.
Oh, there's also games where the *ahem* non-DRM version was the only playable copy. Prototype was like that for me, and for a long time Red Faction: Guerrilla. Yeah, I own a legit copy, but the only way I could play the damn game without things crashing was to use the non-legit version. -
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This is when launching from Steam with very few mods (just MTUI and the community fix patches).
It may be a GFWL thing since F3 still requires a GFWL login at launch; I don't remember having the problem with Arkham Asylum or other GFWL titles on Steam; I don't think AssCreed I and II (UPlay) tracked hours right either now that I think of it.
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I will freely admit that certain games I've purchased with the intent of playing them "sometime" but never getting around to it. Fortunately, most are things I got on steam sale for ridiculously cheap. I'd feel bad if I blew $20 or more on a game and never played it. $5? Eh, not too bad a loss.
Also, a huge portion of my library - damn near a third - comes from Humble Bundle and other bundled packages. Quite often I'll buy bundles for only one game I want because it's cheaper than the solo price anywhere else. Just did that with Master Reboot. $5 for that game plus 19 others I'll never touch. -
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44 Percent of Twitter Accounts Have Never Tweeted
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2456489,00.asp
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The only problem I have is that games before 2009 had their hours reset. So any game in my inventory before then that I haven't played again, well they just consider that I haven't played in at all. So saying I haven't played 30%+ of my games is completely wrong. I've had a Steam account since 2004.
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They didn't even start tracking that stuff across the board until sometime around then I believe. For a while, TF2 was the only game that tracked stats like that and time played was an in game feature that also showed externally on the personal TF2 stats pages, but then they added a similar thing to every game on steam globally in 2008? I want to say.
My library wasn't nearly as huge back then as it is now though.
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I'm sure there's plenty of folks that have repurchased a bunch of old games they loved digitally so they could forget about discs and cd-keys if they were to ever revisit them.
Last year I tried to steam roulette my way through some of my backlog 30 minutes at a time to see if anything I had not played yet grabbed me. The first rule that I had to initiate with was allowing myself skip old games I had already played because there were so many of them getting spun, even though Steam's time played counter failed to show it.
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I love Steam. That being said, I've bought quite a few bundles and never played any of them but the one or two I purchased the bundle for.
Older games I've played and beat I've either purchased again on sale or added in my key codes just so I don't have to dig out of the boxes in the basement an older game should I get the whim to play it.
I've bought games from devs that put out quality working Linux ports just to be supportive.
I've bought games I've owned on earlier consoles just so I don't have to dig out those things should I feel the urge to play.
Point is, maybe I have played a bunch of them already, it just wasn't with Steam, and I will admit there are a few I've never even touched due to bundles. -
I have currently 140 games on my account and i have played about 35 video games in this account. My case is special. I am a software developer, so i am always between projects. When i have free time i love to play. Another reason is because games like Dirt and Fallout 3 do not work properly in Windows 7. That is why i am working on a game engine that works from windows XP to Windows 10, with the least system dependencies possible. Developers forget to fallback if something that is not mandatory fails, like games for windows. I build modular apps that can work without some modules. For example some applications do not launch without database server connection. How are you supposed to solve problems and settings if the application crashes at start? Things like that make people not able to play the games, but at least WE support the industry. I am going to build a new gaming rig and keep my windows XP x64. This way i can play ALL my games. If i use a more recent windows version, mine and all gamers investment that is not being respected will just be flushed into the drain... WE deserve that our money is respected. A lot of people started to buy Playstation3 games digitally, they took a long time to get used to that. And now Playstation 4 uses a diferent architecture and the software is not compatible. People are not moving to ps4 because of that. They did a big investment and they plan to continue to use it. Now with Windows 10 and DX12 we can kiss goodby to 40% if not more video games. Some i run in linux with wine like Mass Efect.
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/* hope it's alright to write it on my native language */
Да, я прекрасно понимаю тех, кто купил игру и не играл в не через стим. Я и сам такой. Главная причина - это то, что на самом-то деле многие игры были заиграны до дыр и до не могу. Но при этом не были куплены по различным причинам - отсутствие в продаже, отсутствие интернета, денег и т.п. Причём в странах СНГ отсутствие лицензионных дисков и доступного интернета действительно имело массовое распространение вплоть до ~2010 г, а где-то и по сей день. Приходилось играть в неофициальные издания, либо скачивать не лицензионные копии. Теперь же, повзрослев, многие отдают почести создателям, и покупают игры детства, особенно есть есть скидки.
Вторая часть - платные игры по акциям бесплатно. Халява. Кто ее не любит. Даже если игра не интересная или скучная.