36% of All Games Owned on Steam Are Never Played

Steven Bogos

The Taco Man
Jan 17, 2013
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36% of All Games Owned on Steam Are Never Played


There's a sizable chunk of most player's Steam libraries that has never even been installed.

We're all guilty of the "pile of shame," that is, a pile of games that we start playing, but then get distracted by the next shiny toy before actually completing them, but according to an Ars Technica Steam database dig [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/04/introducing-steam-gauge-ars-reveals-steams-most-popular-games/], there's a sizable chunk of games in most players libraries that have never even been played. According to the research, approximately 36% of all games registered in players libraries have never been played.

17% of games are played for less than one hour, and 24% are played for between one and ten hours. To be fair, the biggest offender on the "owned and never played" list is Half-Life 2: Lost Coast which is more of a tech demo than a game, and is included free with every purchase of Half-Life 2. Of the 12 million players who own Lost Coast, only 2 million have bothered to boot it up.

In fact, the highest non-Valve game on the list is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, in which 300,000 of it's 5.7 million owners have never played it.

Ars Technica used a random sample of the approximately 172 million publicly accessible Steam profile pages to generate this information, scraping data from up to 90,000 profiles per day for "about two months".

Some of the other information it gathered tells us stuff that we already should know - DoTA 2 and Team Fortress 2 are the most-played games on Steam by a considerable margin, and that Call of Duty players spend a lot more time in the game's multiplayer mode than its singleplayer mode.

It makes for a very interesting read, that's for sure, and the site has put together all sorts of cool statistics.

Source: Ars Technica [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/04/introducing-steam-gauge-ars-reveals-steams-most-popular-games/2/]

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softclocks

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Mar 7, 2014
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Looking at my steam library, around 100 of the 280 games have never been installed.

The main offenders probably being the humble-bundle games. When you buy a 1 dollar bundle because you want 1 game, there's going to be 5 games just gathering dust in the library.

Still, a very interesting (possibly disturbing) trend.

Also, on my profile all of the Borderlands DLC are listed as games, which becomes another 6 "games" where only one is played.
 

snekadid

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Mar 29, 2012
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The only real news here was that people are buying skyrim and never even playing it. ITS A GOOD GAME PEOPLE!

I'm guilty of this, I have a ton of games(feel free to look me up to see how guilty) but in my defense, a massive amount of those came from bundles where i wanted one of the games and it was cheaper than buying it individually. Then again I'm also obsessive compulsive so thats could be a factor too :p
 

Under_your_bed

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Sep 15, 2012
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AntiChri5 said:
Remember kids, Steam Sales are not your friend.
Yeah, fucking steam sales! Giving us games we want for cheap prices! Goddamn, they're screwing us all ov- wait, hang on....
 

AntiChri5

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Nov 9, 2011
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Under_your_bed said:
AntiChri5 said:
Remember kids, Steam Sales are not your friend.
Yeah, fucking steam sales! Giving us games we want for cheap prices! Goddamn, they're screwing us all ov- wait, hang on....
Didn't say they were screwing us over, just that they aren't your friend. It's an important difference. A lot of people have bought a lot of games that they will never get around to playing and would not have bought if Steam didn't offer them for an absurdly good price.

Steam gets a lot of love, but they are still a business. They wouldn't do these sales if they didn't profit from them. That's how they do. For every person who gets a game they would have bought otherwise real cheap, there are another one or two who never would have bought it.
 

Erttheking

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Oct 5, 2011
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Wow, that is a very surprising statistic. I had no idea that is was that low 8D.

All joking aside, yeah, that sounds about right. I blame the summer sale and the humble bundle. Aw well, I'll get around to playing them SOMEDAY! At the very least I want to get through some of them over summer break.
 

Bindal

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May 14, 2012
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Most - or all - of the games I own and never played are those that are part of a bundle and probably not the game from the bundle I cared about.
 

ScrabbitRabbit

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Mar 27, 2012
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Bindal said:
Most - or all - of the games I own and never played are those that are part of a bundle and probably not the game from the bundle I cared about.
Same here. It's often cheaper to buy the bundle than the game I actually want. Though, nowadays I'll often browse my Steam, GOG or Humble Bundle library rather than the store, if I'm looking for something new to play.
 

dangoball

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Jun 20, 2011
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Some of those are from bundles, sure, but I've played some of the games I "have never installed" according to my Steam acc. Those are throwback to my life as a scallywag of the digital seas (I'm clean now, been of the Bay for years and the Steam rehab center is also responsible :p ), buying games I already finished but never payed for. That's why I don't feel like playing them again, though I occasionally go back to some older gems.
 

fix-the-spade

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AntiChri5 said:
Remember kids, Steam Sales are not your friend.
It's bundle sales that have done it for me.

There are games from both the EA and THQ humble bundle that I've never touched, in some cases because I'd played them elsewhere (Dead Space) or because I wasn't overly interested (one of the Company of Heroes expansions).

Then there's the Valve Complete Pack I bought and never touched the Half Life 1 stuff because I'd played them all about twelve times anyway, so another five games never played. It's the side effect of buying multiple titles cheap, nevermind.
 

themilo504

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May 9, 2010
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And this is why steam sales work, customers are happy because they can buy tons of games cheap, and publishers are happy because customers are buying games they would not have bought otherwise.
 

antidonkey

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Dec 10, 2009
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Not surprising at all. What with the cheap sales and all. I have about 10 - 15 games on steam I haven't played........yet. I intend to but haven't gotten around to it yet.
 

Keith K

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Oct 29, 2009
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Well when ya buy a bundle that includes every single game ever made by Bethesda and id for $100, or a huge Humble Bundle for $10, of course there's gonna be fluff in there that you don't actually want.
 

iniudan

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Apr 27, 2011
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Good part of my not played game are mostly the game are cared less about in a Humble Bundle, but that I still registered on steam and the rest are thing that came in bundle deal on steam itself, either as a bonus game that came along a new release or sale bundle that were just cheaper to purchase the whole package then simply get what I wanted.
 

BraveSirRobin

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Mar 17, 2010
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Honestly I find this a bit misleading at least for my personal statistics. I've had a steam account for over 9 years dating back to early 2005. Given that steam didn't start tracking gametime until mid-2009, that is roughly 4.5 years of gameplay just completely unaccounted for. With several hundred games on my account ~20% of those don't actually have gametime accounted on them because I played them before steam even had time tracking. Games like counter-srtike that should have 100's of hours sit at 0 because I've moved on to other games and haven't gone back since. Plus there are the games like Doom and Quake that I play for an hour or two here and there that don't record gametime at all. That said I have quite a few games I have yet to play, but that number probably comes in much closer to 10% of my library.

I realize that I've had an account waaaaay longer than the average user but I still think that it's worth mentioning that that feature wasn't even introduced until over halfway through Steam's current lifecycle.