Steam Statistics Reveal The Shame Of Unplayed Games

Steam Sales seem to be catnip for many PC gamers. The reductions are often so great, that gamers will find themselves buying games – or bundles of multiple titles – that they don’t particularly want, just because they are a good bargain. Now PC enthusiast website Ars Technica have managed to measure this sort of behaviour, through the mining of user data from Steam.

The allure of buying games, but never playing them is illustrated by the discovery that 36.9% of all games owned by Steam users have never been played – not even once. This suggests that the majority of everyone’s Steam games list is untouched. In fact, only a little over 20% of all games owned have ever been played for more than ten hours – which is a reasonable amount of gameplay time to expect from most games.

The numbers also show such figures as DOTA 2 being the most-owned game on Steam, and that users have put more hours of gameplay into Skyrim, Civilization V, Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike: Source, Team Fortress 2 and DOTA 2 than all other games on the platform combined! For many more astounding statistics, check out the full report. It will be interesting to see – now that someone has illustrated how they can make use of Steam statistics – whether Valve become more or less open about revealing numbers themselves.