I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was only 10% due to the massive backlog available.
Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases
Submitted 1 day ago by ZippyBot@lemmy.zip [bot] to gaming@lemmy.zip
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snooggums@piefed.world 1 day ago
mushroommunk@lemmy.today 1 day ago
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.
Chee_Koala@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Eh, yeah, only 14%? 2025 is just one year, and there are so many good choices already. Decades of masterpieces often on sale for 5,- vs 1 year of games yet to prove themselves. Last year was about 15%, 2023 9% and 2022 about 17%, going on the previous replays. so i guess in that context you could say ‘only’ 14%.
edgemaster72@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
78% for me, thanks Expedition 33 and depression making it near impossible to enjoy anything else
jacksilver@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
That percentage only matters in comparison to previous years, otherwise it’s just a random number.
While the article doesn’t give a lot of info, it does say it’s only down 1% from last year.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 17 hours ago
2025: 14%
2024: 15%
2023: 9%
2022: 17%There’s room to be concerned with those numbers.
jacksilver@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Honestly with that small of a sample size those numbers could mean anything.
Wed need to know things like:
- How many hours worth of new game content was released (maybe there were only enough new games to make up 20% of playtime)
- How mich do Games as a Service impact things (they get new content, but aren’t “new” games)
- Are people playing games more or less (people could be playing new games the same amount, but increasing the amount of hours playing old games)
A small sample of averages is really hard to interpret.
Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 18 hours ago
So last year was 15%? That’s 1 percentage point, but you could also say it’s down 6.7%, although we don’t have precise numbers to work with
jacksilver@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
That’s just how the article phrased it, surprisingly it’s hard to find historical “Steam Replay” stats so it’s hard to confirm/expand on any of this.
MudMan@fedia.io 1 day ago
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.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 22 hours ago
The stats they show are pretty basic usage stats many are in the UI already. No one is showing the actual valuable data they are harvesting.
They aren’t really hiding the OS stats, it’s regularly published in the hardware and software survey. Showing my steam deck time is over the average of 0% isn’t really surprising news.
MudMan@fedia.io 21 hours ago
Nnnnah, the hardware survey is a wildly different number. That's what OS each account was using when they filled the survey.
This shows they have data on what OS each user is using at the time of running each game, on both a per-game and a per-hour basis and that they can tie all of it to each account across games and OSs. Which raises the question of why they run the hardware survey OS numbers in the first place, but I suppose if you're sharing the survey results you share the survey results, even if you have more accurate data on the same stats elsewhere.
That'd be a very interesting, very different stat, though, because it means they know what percentage of Windows/Linux users go back and forth, and CAN separate Linux usage from Deck from other OSs, which they very pointedly do not do on the survey, where SteamOS doesn't have its own entry. That's unsurprising but notable, along with the fact that they don't really report on their own hardware sales, either, despite being a main source of info about GPU and CPU vendors.
MrGabr@ttrpg.network 23 hours ago
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.
MudMan@fedia.io 22 hours ago
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.
JoeKrogan@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Mine was 0% for new games. They were all older ones
5in1k@lemmy.zip 21 hours ago
I didn’t play a single 2025 release.
Broadfern@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Mudborne and Slime Rancher 2 were pretty good.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 19 hours ago
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.
Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
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.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
Cyberpunk isn’t a new release though. It might be new to you, but it still wouldn’t count for new releases.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 22 hours ago
I haven’t even bought a game released in 2025. I think these stats are showing a real problem for the gaming industry in general. It’s probably a better use of resources to continue supporting a years old game with moderate popularity than making another new game.
InvalidName2@lemmy.zip 16 hours ago
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.
ThePancakeExperiment@feddit.org 10 hours ago
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.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 22 hours ago
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.
DireTech@sh.itjust.works 10 hours ago
They only count the official release date on Steam. DLC/expansions don’t count even if they are new releases, which I consider pretty odd. My report shows zero new games played, yet I played two expansions that came out this year.
Nelots@piefed.zip 15 hours ago
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.
Geologist@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
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.
DudeImMacGyver@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Mine was higher, but they were all indie games.
Vengefu1Tuna@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Same, there were lots of good indie games this year!
the16bitgamer@programming.dev 17 hours ago
I think my SO was 90% new games but they were all Indi
_haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
There are lots of good indie games every year, just have to find them!
_haha_oh_wow_@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Me too: AAA games are just kinda shit these days, which is kind of a slap in the face given the skyrocketing prices. Plus there’s invasive shit a lot of them started using in the name of anticheat.
The appeal of AAA games was killed long ago by corporate greed.
PM_ME_YOUR_ZOD_RUNES@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Same here, like 55% 2025 titles. So many cool indie games this year. Megabonk, Schedule 1, Expedition 33, etc…