I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was only 10% due to the massive backlog available.
Edit: Just checked and my playtime for 2025 games was 2% which is probably lower than last year as the top two games this year were my same two top games from last year.
Yeah, I’d be more curious about the past three years combined. I know several friends still playing BG3 because they haven’t had time to finish it. As backlogs grow I feel like this will only become more common.
I’ve said this elsewhere, but December is quickly becoming the time of the year when all the corpos tell us just exactly how much they spy on us and we all collectively go “Cool!” and tell each other about it for some reason.
FWIW, the median number of games played is four. Not forty, not fourteen, just four. If we’re going to get spyware stats, at least let’s put them in context. As it turns out, half of all Steam users are only playing the one game (given the numbers we know on concurrents, that’d be CS2/DOTA/PUBG or Apex, in most cases).
The play-everything, strong-opinion-haver user is a fraction of the userbase.
Also interesting, Steam is telling people how their playtime splits between Windows/Deck/Non-Deck Linux… but they pointedly don’t share those stats platform-wide. Sometimes silence is data, too.
Would you be willing to share why you don’t like the “corpo spying”? I personally never understood - an online service has to know your requests in order to serve the results to you, and keeping revords of those requests is the only way to have personalized recommendations, which I would rather have than be served ads for games (or music or whatever) I’ll never even consider.
I’d say I’m more lenient about big data profiles than most people around here. I’d also say I understand why the reaction to the very real, very obvious overreach in the process of creating and using those profiles is radically opposed to any sort of personal recorded info.
The part that’s weird is the cute little exception we make around the December holidays to get weirdly invasive infographics to share on social media.
For the record, I’d dispute that I prefer personalized recs to general ads. I already know the things I like that I want to buy. I’d much rather get a poke on things “I’d never consider”.
I was on some social media site today and noted that there are some controversies going on where I only ever see the pushback and entirely infer that the people holding the opposite stance do exist, but they never show up in my channels. This is not unexpected in an algorithmically curated info landscape… but it’s kind of bad and dangerous.
Ditto for only ever being served media based on the media I already like. Again, obvious but important: that’s decidedly NOT how I got to like the media I already like.
Regarding social media feeds, I have mixed opinions, because you’re right about the echo chamber, but I also am only still on any mainstream platform for the memes, and I only want it to show me memes, which it wouldn’t do if not for personalized recommendations.
As for games, I don’t want my recommendations to be dominated by whatever has the biggest marketing budget and can take over my feed. I mostly play indie games, and I think if my store page wasn’t personalized, I wouldn’t see nearly as many small games as I do.
I mean, you do you, but I don’t see any of the things that you want requiring active surveillance. That all seems very attainable by having decent search, filtering and categorization tools.
If anything, I find myself now seeking “hidden gems on Steam” despite Steam knowing everything about my gaming habits. And that’s on Steam, which does have a semi-decent crowdsourced tagging and categorization system. Their main page recommendations for e have consistently been either generically popular shovelware or insistent recommendations for games I do like but already own in other platforms that I can’t tell Steam to stop shoving down my throat.
Looks like this year I played exactly 0 new games. But what steam doesn’t know is that in September I started Cyberpunk on GOG and haven’t dropped it since. Has to be my game of the year now.
Do we know what valve defines “release” as?
This has come up a lot over the years but between “early access” games that launch in borderline beta form and live games that never leave it (and if you see a similarity between those: congrats, you now understand how important marketing is)… what is the actual difference between a fully new release and a game that just got a major update with 10 hours of story content?
This semi-famously came up back pre-pandemic when Alex Navarro made a fairly impassioned soapbox about Fire Pro World and how if they didn’t discuss it for Giant Bomb’s GOTY the year it entered EA then they never would… and then was immediately shut down. Although Jeff Gerstmann has often talked about how GOTY discussions are really just shopper’s guides and he has always approached them from that perspective.
I don’t doubt the numbers on this scale, but my personal numbers are absolutely not correct, so it does make me wonder how accurate things are.
There’s some long term bug with Steam in the way they compute playtime. About 4 years ago, I purchased a game, played it once for probably less than an hour and never picked it up again. Steam shows I have played that game for almost 3,000 hours.
This year, similar thing happened, but not to the same extreme. There was a game demo I downloaded, played through the first level (which IIRC was all that was available at the time in that demo), and now it’s showing I played that game for over 100 hours. I probably spent 30 minutes with it at most.
Curious what’s going on there or if anybody else has experienced that? Maybe it’s not a widespread thing, but certainly curious that it’s happened to me twice.
Do not have the same problem, but some stuff is wrong in my replay too. Like I’ve played a game in December, and even right before steam replay started and it shows up in November for some reason and some games are missing, and I am always online.
I didn’t play a single 2025 release.
I played Blue Prince, Split Fiction and Death Stranding 2. And one of those was just because it was on PSPlus. Everything else was several years old.
I have Expedition 33 but haven’t got around to playing it yet, because I’m playing the Silent Hill 2 Remake.
I had a bit of playtime in civ vii (literally only on release and then never touched it again lol) and peak (amazing coop) which were 2025 releases, but yeah, most of my playtime was definitely older titles that I picked up on sale.
Spider-Man remastered (fantastic), hitman (also great), dredge (short but fun), red dead redemption2, and a bunch of older indies accounted for the lions share of my playtime.
Only 2% new releases for me. Literally just Peak and then a couple of trials for games like Trails in the Sky, all of which individually account for <1% of my total play time this year.
