Yeah, and?
alternative headline “steam users have a ton of games they got from a humble bundle for super cheap and we didn’t take that into account and used the msrp value of each game for this shocking headline.”
Also some games don’t count time on older games. i know I have games like half life 2 episode 1 that i have beaten that show I never played them since I played them before they started tracking time.
I’ve had games not record time because I was in offline mode on vacation and I pre-downloaded it, or I just played in offline mode or directly from a game’s executable without steam’s crap embedded.
In the past it’s been trivial to set achievement unlocks and time played with 3rd party tools too.
I don’t see any kind of discounts mentioned either. I almost never buy from steam directly, usually reputable 3rd party sites like Fanatical, GamersGate, WinGameStore etc that I find through isthereanydeal. It’ll show as being on my account but nobody knows what I paid for it and I almost never pay MSRP.
Then there’s the countless bundle keys I used to get that I definitely never played and will never play because I wanted 2-3 games in a bundle of 10-20 that was cheaper than one of the games alone.
It wouldn’t shock me at all if there was 10 billion worth of unplayed games though. I have friends that buy all the hot releases and then barely touch them because a couple hundred bucks a month is not significant to their monthly budget.
agreed but barely touch is not the same as never touch that’s why I think they are looking at play time as some kind of real metic where it’s been broken from the beginning. You make a really good point as well about offline can also impact that as well.
And I’ll do it again.
I think the summer sale starts tomorrow, definitely gonna add a few more to the old backlog lol
Humble Bundle is a big contributor to my unplayed games. There’s usually only a few games in a bundle that I’m interested in at a good price, and the test I’ll eventually get to… Maybe when I retire… If I get to retire…
Same. My unplayed list of games is what I plan on doing when I retire. When I can sit down and concentrate on something without someone pinging me on teams…
So does that compensate for all those pirated games that people actually do play?
Like…each of us…right?
Yes individually. XD
and valve got 30% of that… for basically doing nothing more than hosting a store page. If you’re wondering why we don’t have Half-life 10 by now.
I’ll glady pay a 30% tax to play on linux and have the steam client
This isn’t anyone playing anything. This is a story about how people bought $19 billion worth of games and then never played them (which would suggest they likely never downloaded them either). Valve made over $6 billion and used no more resources than serving up the store page and the payment processing.
and this is why Valve is in no rush to pump out games like they used to. Why they have no real burning desire to continue half life. They made enough money to keep the lights on indefinitely by doing no more than simply letting an automatic process run that any first year web developer could set up.
This is insinuating they aren’t doing anything when they made a whole new engine, the steam deck, steamOS and more importantly proton.
It’s not insinuating anything like that. It’s stating a simple fact that they got 6 Billion dollars for basically zero effort and resources. All of the things you’ve described are to allow people to buy more games. They cement valve simply as a store front and platform but not a game developer.
This is the point as to why Half life and most other games were basically dropped. Valve made 6 billion in passive income while trying to build a game selling and delivery platform. Even the best game in the world isn’t going to make that kind of income and it’s likely to take more effort than what they’ve done already.
Finally, a customer base for my games
I have absolutely bought games and played them for less than 2 hours and never played them again. I’m a lot more discriminating now, but as recently as last month I bought a game because I thought I would like it. I played a couple of times but can’t get into it. I would love to have a new, fun MMO to play but there are so many that look interesting and then… bleh.
I just did that with the Manor Lords the city builder. Looked super cool, was way way too steep of a learning curve and very slow for me, so I never went back. If I don’t see a game getting more fun or accessible after ten hours, I’ll never touch it again. Basically did this for Rust, Ark, Pal World, and Zomboid most recently.
I don’t really use steam and I have this problem too. I buy discs used, and I don’t always look up gameplay videos… so yeah, often not my cup of tea turns out. But resellable if I want down the line, at least.
Just the other day I bought a Wii super monkeyball game that uses the balance board. I have everything I need to play it, but the chances of actually doing that are pretty slim, tbh. A lot of the older games (anything under $10 for consoles more than a decade old, really) I buy are like that. “Might be fun, might never get played, but in an emergency, can be sold”.
I miss playing mmos, but none of them have hit like vanilla wow on a pve server, and now I hate people too much to bother. If I could spin up a server of my own and just play by myself or with a few people I know, sure, but most games don’t allow that. So single player it is.
Prior to WoW a much better MMO, EverQuest, was already out. There’s a reboot server that’s about to launch the second expansion on the 1st that’s free to play run by enthusiasts. It’s called Project Quarm and it’s easy to get going.
I really never got into EverQuest. Maybe I’ll try again, but honestly at this point I’m sort of over social games. I played a lot of neverwinter when I was transitioning off wow, and it did the job, but I’ve not found any sort of mmo since that really makes me want to play… because all I want to do most of the time is solo play and pug dungeons (always a disappointment).
I used to be a raid leader and main healer for the guilds’ clan (we had a group of iirc 6 casual guilds that shared forums and a vent server and would do stuff together like a super guild) and I miss doing that but… not enough to try to find it again I guess.
I desperately want to be into games like helldivers or other “major hit” social play games, but they are without fail not my style of game. So… eh. I think that time in my life is just gone. Maybe when immersive VR is a major thing and there are mmos for it (ideally that don’t give me horrible motion sickness), that sounds pretty cool. But I won’t wait around with bated breath.
I’m part of the problem.
This number is likely very inflated though and doesn’t match what people actually spent on unplayed games.
It couldn’t have accounted for key sales or bundle purchases. I have at least a hundred unplayed games that were included in some random Humble Bundle I bought just because of one game that was in that bundle. If you were to divide bundle pricing by amount of unplayed games, it’d be like 1 or 2 bucks per game.
If you were to divide bundle pricing by amount of unplayed games, it’d be like 1 or 2 bucks per game.
And even that number isn’t really representative, because when I buy a bundle for one game, it’s because the bundle price is at or at least pretty near the historic low for that game. So the “extra” games aren’t really costing me anything.
this is what i have been saying all along
Just want to add, not only is it a ridiculous number because of sales, there’s also free games that wreck the numbers.
Glancing at my unplayed library, sure there’s a bunch of leftovers from Humble Bundles I got ages ago for what amounted to a fraction of retail, but there’s also things like BioShock 1&2 Remastered - games that were given out FOR FREE to owners of the original. I’ve PLAYED the originals, but I assume the powers that be would tell you I have $60 worth of unplayed games sitting there since I haven’t opened the remasters.
Also depending on how theyre counted some games have beta servers and shit listed separately also mod kits and the like can be included in this.
I have a large collection of unplayed games, and most of them came from Humble Bundle.
Same, but also add Fanatical and game giveaways.
This is true for me as well. I’m going to guess 95% or more of my steam games come from bundles. I have only bought a few games on steam itself. Similar situation with GOG, where a large majority of my games have been bought on 80-95% off sales. Just in case the itch strikes…
I used to buy games that devs talked about on reddit’s game dev subs. No intent to play them. I’d just pick 'em up to help the dev if I liked them or their style.
I’m at least $200 of this statistic, now do the people who played for less than ten hours. I’d be like $1,000.
Less then 1h i’m probably at around $1000 lol
To be fair, I have a ton of games I completed with under 10 hours in them.
And a bunch I didn’t complete, but felt I got good value from for <10h playtime.
I’ll play them when I get the time. I never get any time :(
