Steam Gauge: Addressing your questions and concerns

Plus, we offer an expanded list of the Top 100 most played Steam games.

Read the whole story

 

[Voo42]

In the official API free games that are owned by everyone are either not listed at all, or you can pass a flag that it lists them only if the person has actually played the game.

So by principle of exclusion you could certainly figure out who hasn't played it and get statistics that way. For example I never played TF2 that I can think of.

 

[enkilm]

There a few games that steam installed in my library without asking and so far i have not been able to remove such as Spiral Knights which steam probably added to promote numbers.

 

[FoolishOwl]

vartec[/url]":3iwniuq6]

Pantagruel[/url]":3iwniuq6]I personally think the "games bought but never played" data from the other article is one of the most important take outs of all this. It seems Steam Sales create an opportunity for titles to generate revenue from audiences they don't even actually appeal to. I really can't decide if this is good or bad.

Well, there are games that I bought but haven't time to play, but that's not very typical. Actually I think most of owned-not-played come from bundles. I've bought quite a few bundles of 6-8 games just to play 2-3 of them.

I have a lot I've bought and haven't played, and I've heard similar things from friends who consider themselves gamers. It looks like it's a more common situation than I expected, but then, I also discovered my tastes turn out to be more typical than I realized.

Elsewhere, I've heard that the typical "gamer" is an adult, in early middle age -- which is to say, people with less free time but more disposable income than teens or young adults. I have bought a lot of Humble Bundle offerings, getting several indie games at once cheaply; they offered Steam keys for most games from the beginning, and have become better integrated into Steam since then. And, there are the frequent sales on Steam.

Years ago, I discovered that it worked out well to buy games from the "bargain bin", because you can get older games much more cheaply, be reasonably sure they'll run well on your less-than-cutting-edge computer, and you're likely to have heard from people who've actually played the games (as opposed to corrupt professional game reviewers). In fact, one of the best gaming purchases I ever made was when I looked in a literal bargain bin at a (now defunct) computer shop, and picked out Fallout 2 and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, for $10 each. Steam, GOG, and other online game retailers have had a lot of success selling old games from publishers on the cheap -- and how much could the publishers hope to sell otherwise? This works out to everyone's benefit, (at least as far as these things can under a market system).

Also, with the rise of indie game developers, there are a lot more innovative, small, games being offered cheaply, and often advertised prominently through Steam. Just yesterday, for instance, I spent $2.50 on a game that sounded interesting, but I haven't gotten around to playing yet.

 

[Titanium Dragon]

star skies[/url]":1e2wn0hx]Wow, Deus Ex: Human Revolution isn't even on there? Not even a million players through Steam? I'm finding it hard to believe that FTL: Faster Than Light did so much better, as much as I love that space sim.

FTL launched at a lower price, and I have yet to actually play either it or Deus Ex.

I'm curious about the other big PC games which don't show up on here, namely Battlenet and Origin stuff, as well as League of Legends.

 

[pqr]

Thor84no[/url]":2wjmph0o]

pqr[/url]":2wjmph0o]By the way, small request. Could you post most hours played for those top 100 games? Would tell us how devoted/addicted/loving we are compared to most devoted/addicted/loving person for each game.

This kind of sampling and extrapolating doesn't lend itself well to finding outliers in the full data set, so even if they did post the "most" hours played, there'd be no way to know if it was even close to accurate. Basically, without checking everyone's play time for a game, how will you know one of the ones you haven't checked yet doesn't beat your current highest value by orders of magnitude?

Of course but it still gives an idea about where tails are and I would like to see it By 'most' I meant 'most Kyle found'.

 

[Sufinsil]

Titanium Dragon[/url]":22d3xyfu]

star skies[/url]":22d3xyfu]Wow, Deus Ex: Human Revolution isn't even on there? Not even a million players through Steam? I'm finding it hard to believe that FTL: Faster Than Light did so much better, as much as I love that space sim.

FTL launched at a lower price, and I have yet to actually play either it or Deus Ex.

I'm curious about the other big PC games which don't show up on here, namely Battlenet and Origin stuff, as well as League of Legends.

Riot shares their numbers time to time. Last infographic was in 2012. They did say in Mar 2013 they had 5 million global concurrent players.

Blizzard reports copies sold every quarter usually. And has fun infographic time to time of random stats.

 

[Pantagruel]

I don't know if anybody still cares, but I just remembered I have a screen that proves something I said earlier about the way Steam logs hours:

As you can see, the game was still being "downloaded" by Uplay while Steam logged 3 hours of gameplay. It's a very minor issue, either way, I just wanted to share.

(Yeah, I spent more than 4 hours that trying to get the thing to work. Even though I had downloaded a sizable client through Steam, Uplay went through endless updates and then decided to redownload the game all over again. I still have hard feeling over it.)

 

[Heather Stark]

I think your graph and your words are telling different stories. Which is right? In the graph "Players ad percentage of registered owners", it looks to me as though about 18% of games are played by 100% of their owners, and by contrast about 4% of games are played by 0% of their owners. But the copy says that 26.1% of games are played by 0% of their owners. I'm confused. Maybe the problem is with the labelling of the graph? Could you explain? thanks.

p.s. really interesting analysis!

 

[Heather Stark]

Nice job correcting for titles relased since playtime was logged. I have yet another correction for you to consider, that is likely to swing the never-played number in another direction.

At the moment it seems like f2p titles are included in profiles only when they are downloaded played. So there is missing data on f2p titles that are downloaded but not played. However f2p titles seem to be included in your aggregate estimates. This is likely to over-inflate your estimates of hours played for all titles.

Is it possible for you to programatically separate out f2p and paid-for titles? If it is, that would give a better estimate. For the f2p titles you will have data on only played titles, and this not very meaningful data could get partitioned off from the rest of the data. Then for the paid for titles, you will be able to get the split you are looking for - of downloaded but not played titles - without the distortion introduced by including the always-played f2p data.

p.s. just checked and it seems that there are only 103 f2p titles on steam at the moment - so this might be a story that can be kicked into the long grass for a while....
http://store.steampowered.com/search/?g ... egory1=998

p.p.s. but given dota 2 and tft 2 are the top of the list *and* are f2p - it might be worth hunting in the long grass for that data split....

 

[sswam]

Thanks for your work on this, very interesting!

 

[sswam]

Sufinsil[/url]":20qldcfw]

DarkSyd[/url]":20qldcfw]I bet EA is having a sad somewhere...and maybe someone on Origin is reading about it.

Why would they be?

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/ea-ori ... 0-6417168/

Let me show you why EA / Origin should be sad.

That article says "61 billion minutes per year". That's "misleading with statistics". They might as well say 300 trillion seconds per century. Let's fix it.

61 billion minutes per year = 1 billion hours per year = 2.8 million hours per day = 116,000 concurrent users on average. Not so impressive now, Origin.

Steam has about 6 million concurrent users, and DOTA2 has about 550,000.

So DOTA2 is about 5 times bigger than Origin, and Steam is 50 times bigger than Origin.

Cry some more, Origin. Cry some more.

 

[Voo42]

sswam[/url]":1nzgp8c1]

Sufinsil[/url]":1nzgp8c1]

DarkSyd[/url]":1nzgp8c1]I bet EA is having a sad somewhere...and maybe someone on Origin is reading about it.

Why would they be?

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/ea-ori ... 0-6417168/

Let me show you why EA / Origin should be sad.

That article says "61 billion minutes per year". That's "misleading with statistics". They might as well say 300 trillion seconds per century. Let's fix it.

61 billion minutes per year = 1 billion hours per year = 2.8 million hours per day = 116,000 concurrent users on average. Not so impressive now, Origin.

Steam has about 6 million concurrent users, and DOTA2 has about 550,000.

That.. must win the price for the most misleading way to interpret statistics xX

The 6 million concurrent users were a) not an average and b) absolutely certainly not kept over 24 hours. There are some clear times when peak concurrent user numbers are reached since the usage numbers of both Steam and Origin certainly aren't equally distributed throughout all timezones. Especially if both Europe and the US aren't during usual gaming hours the load will be exceedingly lower than otherwise - very simple.