There were games released this year? Neat. I’ll probably check them out. Right after another round of Tetris.
Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases
Submitted 23 hours ago by mcforest@feddit.org to patientgamers@sh.itjust.works
Comments
pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip 11 minutes ago
LORDSMEGMA@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
Makes sense, most games were released before 2025
InfiniteStruggle@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
Next year it is going to be even lower with how prices are going. Upgrades are just not feasible anymore.
ms_lane@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Glad I got a 9070XT just before everything went bust. I’ll be sticking with DDR4 for a few years though.
HouseWolf@pawb.social 22 hours ago
I’m using 32GB of Corsair DDR4 I got back in 2016. Think I can safely say I got my moneys worth already and still intend to ride it into 2030 at this rate.
Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 19 hours ago
The general trend, yes.
But then again, my computer is now many years old (some components more than others) and I’m pretty sure I could play every release from this year on the highest graphic setting (or at least on “high”) without performance issues.
What I’m trying to say is not “my PC is so great” but you you don’t actually need a current-Gen, high end PC to play even recent triple-A titles. Eventually it’ll get too old, but that is a very long time: probably close to a decade or something, if you individually upgrade some things occasionally.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 1 hour ago
You are absolutely incorrect. I have a really powerful modern computer, and I can’t do this. Well, I can, just with low framerate or significant upscaling (the latter I would call not the highest settings anyway). I can run them on higher settings usually, but not maxed. Hell, some of the worse performance ones I need to turn down to get a framerate I find acceptable (at least 60 for most games, usually 100+).
I mostly don’t care to play AAA titles anyway though. Not only are they performance hogs usually, I just don’t find them interesting. I’d almost always rather play an indie game that wants to experiment.
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 13 hours ago
New games are expensive and the all those UE5 games run like crap, cause I can’t afford high end hardware either. Of course I’ll just play old games.
foggianism@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
I was just about to invest in a high-end PC when the RAM prices started to go crazy. I’ll wait it out. My PS5 is gonna make it easier for me to wait.
Dindonmasker@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
Hopefully the gabecube will be affordable and able to run a lot well.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Wait for a PS6 that Sony will sell at a loss due to earning it back on games and salvage that sweet sweet ram and GPU for a home made PC lol.
mcforest@feddit.org 21 hours ago
Like a true patient gamer I didn’t play a single game from 2025.
Quazatron@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Respect.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 15 hours ago
Fascinatingly, this number can’t even include Fortnite, since it’s not on Steam, and has got to be the elephant in the room in terms of play time going to older games. But that is something to keep in mind when you see stats like this. It’s not all “New releases failing.” A lot of it is “Games have a much longer lifespan now.”
Numbers wise, my top 3 were Helldivers 2, Warframe, and Vampire Survivors, all of which continued to receive content updates throughout 2025. These aren’t old games sitting on a shelf gathering dust that I went and unearthed. They’re in their prime. Warframe released a huge update specifically to coincide with the Game Awards, with a trailer featuring Werner Herzog. They’ve never been a bigger deal. Helldivers had their single biggest in-game event this year. I’ve also been spending a lot of time with Rogue Trader (just got a big patch) and Dark Tide (got two new classes and a lot of new maps added this year). Ready or Not and Insurgency also got content updates this year.
So, yeah, peeling people away from an existing title is a much slower process now. Games no longer land like a meteor. The real successes creep up.
This is not to say that there hasn’t been an absolute dearth of worthwhile content from the big studios. You’ll notice that every single thing I listed there is, by at least some definition, an indie game. Helldivers 2 has a big publisher in Sony, but Arrowhead were hardly a major or well known developer. Other than that, it’s all outside of the traditional publisher system. And that’s frankly a good and healthy thing. We’re seeing guys like Larian and Sandfall, Arrowhead, DE, Owlcat, Fat Shark, NetEase, Team Cherry, Super Giant, all just absolutely crushing it, and that’s genuinely fantastic news for the medium.
It’s weird how people look at the failures of Ubisoft and EA and act like this is a bad time to be a gamer. This is one of the best times there’s ever been to be a gamer. The medium hasn’t been this healthy since the glory days of the mid-nineties, and I say that as one of the old farts who grew up in those glory days. Sandfall made Clair Obscur with a team of 60, and it’s incredible. Owlcat made Rogue Trader for basically nothing in a shed and it’s one of the best RPGs you’ll ever play. Vampire Survivors had a budget of like three french fries and some pocket lint and it’s one of the most addictive gaming experiences ever. Balatro was like one guy and it absolutely blew up the world. The fact that we’re getting games this fucking good from outside of the big name publishers is genuinely amazing. I remember the mid 2000s when indie gaming was dead in a ditch, PC gaming was just nothing but console ports, and the only stuff we got was the endless drivel the major publishers shovelled out. Yeah, there were good releases sprinkled in there, but for the most part creativity and imagination were absolutely dead. Now we get stuff like Valheim, Stardew Valley, Project Zomboid, Space Marine 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Lethal Company, Among Us, Speed Freeks, Hardspace: Shipbreaker, Escape from Tarkov, Shadows of Doubt, Hades 2, Forever Winter… And yeah, some of that stuff is janky or buggy or messy, but it’s inventive and cool and slick and all of it is coming from outside of the big names.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 hours ago
Outside of a few exceptions, older games are ironically more novel and have more interesting gameplay.
And practically no one can actually afford the super duper premium Nvidia prices required to make an unoptimized UE5 engine game actually run well.
… Half of the gaming market in general is gacha games on mobile phones.
Most permaonline ‘hardcore’ gamers, people you ou see on game related discussion forums, as well as industry marketing execs, and yes, both pay for play gaming ‘journalists’, and most of your favorite youtube/twitch game opinion havers… they’re all delusionally out of touch with the basic economic reality most gamers are in.
This is why things like Stop Killing Games are important.
Publishers know that existing games are their primary competition, thats why they want them to be unplayable.
MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 hours ago
The performance issues are a major one for me, nothing worse than firing up a new game and getting 40fps with tons of stuttering along the way.
I feel like most newer games also have trouble with low/medium settings not really being that much better for performance, so there’s no fix for it.
I remember older games where low was like staring at a character made from 12 polygons and everything looked awful, but it would run on just about anything.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
Its because many game studios just started making many games that just assume you have some kind of raytracing capable GPU.
They largely stopped bothering to properly support and properly optimize for the hardware situations where you don’t.
A whole bunch of post processing and even just basic scene rendering?
Yeah, they’re now done in kinds of render pipelines that more or less blow up or chug without cards that have at least some ray tracing support, even if you actually have all your in game settings down to as low as possible.
Its hard to set up lights and bake light maps and such in the old fashioned way, its easy to just let the engine handle all of that for you as a dev, auto magically.
Problem is, very few dev teams actually know how to use UE5 properly, and I don’t blame them, it is absurdly complex.
Threat Interactive on youtube more or less has hours of extremely technical breakdowns of UE5 shennanigannery, and also comparisons to somewhat niche techniques used by select, older games, that are as, nearly as, or sometimes actually just better than many UE5 games at realistic high fidelity graphics… while also being more performant, running on older hardware.
Its exceedingly technical and complicated, but the upshot is: No, you’re not crazy, these idiots are often intentionally, often unintentionally, doing things in stupid ways, unnecessary ways.
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Tim Cain (the lead on the original Fallout and a long time programmer) talked about his experience being a programmer for hire at a major studio later in his career. It as a culture shock for him to see younger programmers basically doing no optimization. When he talked to them about it the attitude was basically that it wasn’t worth the time to do, since none of the higher ups cared about it, and the programmers could easily get whatever they assignment was done with bloated, unoptimized code. There wasn’t any experience in optimizing or a culture of doing it.
ngdev@lemmy.zip 14 hours ago
to your GTA 6 point: i will not be buying it until it releases on pc. rumor is, and history agrees, that it will be a console only release for like a year. and even then im gonna borrow it first to see if its worth a shit before paying a dime. and i might not pay even if i do like it lol
caut_R@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
I played like three games from this year. PEAK, MH Wilds, MK World.
The joy of playing older games is that they run well since they‘ve had years of patches and there‘s been years of faster hardware to power through most of the lack of optimization. And they‘re about a quarter the price. For running four times worse, new games also certainly don‘t look four times better.
ToastedRavioli@midwest.social 14 hours ago
The only new game ive played this year is Ball X Pit and it is phenomenal and runs flawlessly for a game that is less than 3 months from release. I hope they keep adding onto it
caut_R@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Should‘ve probably clarified that I was talking about AAA games, the big budget big asking price kind of. Indie games usually run great.
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Sophocles@infosec.pub 20 hours ago
Same, 80% of my gaming was on older releases. The only game I played released in 2025 was an indie TD game called Dungeon Warfare III, mostly because I played and loved I and II.
Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 19 hours ago
Dungeon Warfare is a great tower defense series, just like you i can only recommend it - haven’t tried the third one yet tho.
HornedMeatBeast@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
I had some financial troubles recently, so I have not been buying any AAA games for over a year but I have bought some new little games here and there like Peak or some free to play games so my new release percentage is 22%
54% is 1 to 7 year old games.
24% is 8 years or older.
Still rocking Elite Dangerous.
kbal@fedia.io 15 hours ago
I wonder how much was for 2011 releases because apparently 86% of my time in Steam games this year was in Skyrim.
balderdash9@lemmy.zip 17 hours ago
Patient gamer chiming in. I’ve been playing Cyberpunk 2077 for the first time and loving it. No bugs, a great expansion, and paid $20. For single player games the backlog keeps me a few years behind and the cycle continues.
saimen@feddit.org 19 hours ago
Wait there are new games coming out still? I thought everyone was just working on their pile of shame.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 15 hours ago
I mean, Clair Obscur and Silksong both came out this year, and they’re fantastic.
But if we’re talking triple A stuff? Uh… Not a clue. I wanna say there was a Battlefield game?
DonutsRMeh@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
I mostly play PS3 games on RPCS3. Very few newer games are my taste.
xtools@programming.dev 14 hours ago
ps2-ps3 is my go-to era too. i go back to my RGH’d xbox360 equipped with an external 1tb hdd more often than the ps4 or steam
BetaDoggo_@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Not that surprising when most of top played titles are evergreen esports which came out years ago.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 15 hours ago
People with massive backlogs: aw yeah, it’s all coming together
Kolanaki@pawb.social 12 hours ago
It shows almost all my play time is in new releases but thw only reason for that is that hella my games got free remaster upgrades that are entirely separate titles on Steam. They’re not really new releases, IMO.
AeonFelis@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
They do this to stay in the top of the lists, pushing down actually new games from smaller studios.
dukemirage@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Not surprising
Dojan@pawb.social 21 hours ago
I think I bought one game from 2025 this year. Two-Point Museum. Great value. I’ve had a blast with it.
I’ve no idea what AAA releases have come out this year, and I don’t particularly care. They tend to be garbage anyway.
mohab@piefed.social 22 hours ago
1% for me and I could not even tell which game(s) because I do not own anything released this year. I’m guessing they count demos/playtest.
I do have 7 2025 games on my wishlist though, but no reason to pull the trigger on any of them before summer/winter sale 2026.
Kirk@startrek.website 17 hours ago
Most of my 2025 was Silksong actually, but for only $20 it felt like a patient gamer moment!
stargazingpenguin@lemmy.zip 18 hours ago
Yeah, 3% of mine was new releases! 8% was from 1-7 years, and 89% was 8+. It’s not because of the cost of games or upgrades though, I just don’t care about most of the new games that come out. I already have games I like to play!
Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
I must have play 3-4 games and not more than 40 hours this entire years, and it says my stats makes me
Quazatron@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
The only 2025 game I recall buying is Darkenstein 3D. Simple and fun, just the way I like.
Zephorah@discuss.online 21 hours ago
Played Pathfinder, the second one. Replayed Neverwinter Nights 1&2. Did a Legendary ME run through, because, why not? A sprinkling of Stellaris throughout, no recent expansion adds.
Checks out.
The prices are off the rails lately, and the games are not as good. I can’t justify $100 for a game alongside the electric bill and groceries.
mcforest@feddit.org 20 hours ago
I started Wrath of the Righteous in January and still haven’t finished it :/ But I’m over 160 hours in and close to the end.
I played some other games in between, but I’m kinda impressed you beat so many beasts of games.
Zephorah@discuss.online 15 hours ago
I don’t have all the expansions for that pathfinder.
thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 21 hours ago
I’d be more curious to see what percentage of game sales were for 2025 titles versus older.
I think that would paint a truer picture of player behaviour, and whether there are any fundamental shifts in trends.
flamiera@kbin.melroy.org 22 hours ago
Yeah and?
Like, let the players get to their backlog. Good opportunity while the prices appear to be the same no matter the age of the game most times.
scintilla@crust.piefed.social 21 hours ago
I mean if people aren’t buying new games it’s def a bag thing for the developers and publishers. Feel however you want about them but modern AAA games don’t get made without crazy investments. Hell even AA games are starting to eat 10s of millions.
Drusas@fedia.io 19 hours ago
If they aren't buying them yes, but this looked at what people are playing.
flamiera@kbin.melroy.org 21 hours ago
What does that have to do with gaming backlogs?
csolisr@hub.azkware.net 16 hours ago
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This year I basically ditched gaming. Last year I was juggling like fourteen games on three different platforms- but after an accident where I could not use my right hand for a month, I was forced to lose the streak and since then I've barely touched a controller. My time this year was spent in, no joke, just three games on PC. Balatro because of course, Monster Hunter Wilds because I had already preordered it (and I eventually had to drop it because of lack of time), and Final Fantasy from the Pixel Remaster (because I found about GameHub for Android and wanted to test a lightweight game my phone could run). Next year things might change and I might tackle my backlog again, but with the same two-ish hours of free time per day on weekdays, I doubt it.
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imetators@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 minutes ago
Which probably only proves that Steam Machines is going to be more than enough for everyone.