Steam's Most Popular Games 118
An anonymous reader writes "The folks at Ars Technica scraped a ton of gameplay data from Steam's player profiles to provide statistics on how many people own each game, and how often it's played. For example: 37% of the ~781 million games owned by Steam users have never been played. Dota 2 has been played by almost 26 million people for a total of 3.8 billion hours. Players of CoD: Modern Warfare 2 spend six times as long in multiplayer as in single-player. This sampling gives much more precise data than we usually have about game sales rates. 'If there's one big takeaway from looking at the entirety of our Steam sales and player data, it's that a few huge ultra-hits are driving the majority of Steam usage. The vast majority of titles form a "long tail" of relative crumbs. Out of about 2,750 titles we've tracked using our sampling method, the top 110 sellers represent about half of the individual games registered to Steam accounts. That's about four percent of the distinct titles, each of which has sold 1.38 million copies or more. This represents about 50 percent of the registered sales on the service. ... about half of the estimated 18.5 billion man-hours that have been spent across all Steam games have gone toward just the six most popular titles.'"
Some error on unplayed games (Score:5, Interesting)
1. The time played started being recorded a couple years ago. Games played before that default to zero. For example, I put on probably hundreds of hours of Counter Strike 1.6 in High School, but it is listed as unplayed in my Steam profile
2. I didn't see how they handled game expansions, which are often listed as separate games, but they are unplayed. For Borderlands, I have four additional "games" with no playtime
Re:Scalded (Score:4, Interesting)
so if you went to bestbuy, bought the (physical) game box, took it home, installed it and figured out it wouldn't run, would you have called your c/c company to withhold the payment to bestbuy until you were able to run the game? What does Valve have anything to do with a game working or not working? It's not that physical stores allow you to take back opened software nowadays either...
If he had gotten it from Best Buy he'd have basic consumer rights to refund, a working product, etc. enforced by policy and executed by a human (be it a sales associate, manager, whoever).
If he had gotten it from best Buy he would have received actual human interaction when first complaining about it. Best Buy may be a joke and the Geek Squad may be a ripoff, but the mere presence of a human being who has some idea of how to troubleshoot shit, or at least whose job it is to keep customers happy, is about 87 miles ahead of Steam's "support".
Steam support simply doesn't exist unless you threaten to issue a chargeback or sue. No human at Valve even SEES your support ticket until 2 automated "solutions" are generated and spit out - 1 blaming your ISP and 1 telling you to delete clientregistry.blob or reinstall Steam. After that they blame the developer and close your ticket.
Re:Partial statistics (Score:4, Interesting)
It doesn't sound like piracy is making much of a impact to me.
And it likely never did. It was a big bunch of scare mongering, "Oh no the pirates are cutting hard core into our profits!!!!"
There is a basic fact about piracy... most people who pirate software fall into two categories:
1. The group that bought the software, but wants to remove it's DRM.
2. The group that will NEVER buy the software, regardless of price or DRM.
I think Steam proves this. Piracy is still alive and well, yes? So it wasn't a problem of accessibility. Steam erased accessibility issues. Bottom line: Pirates are likely never to be your customers, no matter what.