Steam Gamers Spend Just 15% of Time on New Releases (pcgamer.com) 55
Steam users spent only 15% of their total gaming time on new releases in 2024, according to the platform's year-end review, an increase from 9% in 2023 but below 2022's 17%.
Legacy titles dominated playtime, with 47% spent on games released in the past seven years and 37% on titles older than eight years. New online games like Helldivers 2 and Black Myth: Wukong helped drive 2024's modest uptick in new game engagement across Steam's library of over 200,000 titles, while established service games like Counter-Strike and Dota 2 maintained their long-standing popularity.
Legacy titles dominated playtime, with 47% spent on games released in the past seven years and 37% on titles older than eight years. New online games like Helldivers 2 and Black Myth: Wukong helped drive 2024's modest uptick in new game engagement across Steam's library of over 200,000 titles, while established service games like Counter-Strike and Dota 2 maintained their long-standing popularity.
No no no (Score:2, Insightful)
If the industry starts paying attention to this, they are absolutely going to start leaning on valve to discourage playing older games and something is going to become a lot more annoying.
Re:No no no (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I've been a gamer since the VIC-20 days and now own over 500 titles, most through Steam. I keep going back to play the legacy games I own because, like Hollywood, the industry keeps recycling the same old crap in a new package. Likewise, I'm not buying new games. Where did the innovation go?
I haven't personally been a gamer in a very long time, but it was my experience that for multiplayer games, a new game had to really offer something novel to justify players shifting from their then-current favorites over to the new game.
Re: (Score:2)
Starcraft is still fun for me, thats like 1998, so yea. I see you can get all the old Tex Murphy games for $5 for the bundle
Re: (Score:2)
"Older games" certainly includes various well loved singleplayer titles or 'classic' multiplayer ones that don't kick back to the mothership anymore; but it also includes 'live service' and not-technically-live-service-but-look-at-all-those-skins-and-battle-passes titles that happen to have original release dates from some time ago.
Something like DO
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Valve literally runs the likes of Counter Strike. "Leaning on Valve" over this would be laughable.
This before the fact that biggest games off steam are also older. Fortnite, LoL, WoW etc.
Re: No no no (Score:2)
As the 800lb gorilla, Valve DGAF. They have been instituting consumer friendly labeling requirements regarding DRM and such and there is no exodus.
New games have gotten worse (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
This is why we need to legalize piracy of delisted games
I agree that we need to revise copyright law to address the problem of abandoned works, but is it really piracy if copying is legal?
Re: (Score:2)
Yaaaar!
Ima pirate, but a legal one, so I'll only file an injunction for public release.
Re: (Score:2)
The CPUs and GPUs did not get that much better, as they have in the past.
The jump to 4K was a bit much (but it had to happen, 4K displays are very affordable).
The people in charge don't seem to be nerds anymore. It seems to be business and arts majors running things more now. But this really is geek culture. And if artsy people take charge, I expect better writing, better NPC modeling, world building etc. These have not seen significant improvements and in some studios famed for these, it seems to have gott
Re: (Score:2)
[waves hand]
Dropped outta art school to run super computers but wtf do I know?
Re: (Score:2)
The actual problem is the opposite. GPUs and CPUs are massively better. Engines are way better. Tools are way better.
But time of graphics developer got hilariously expensive (and bloat is mostly in the DEI side, such as writing, where a lot of money was injected in the wake of woke takeover of much of industry).
As a result, developers are now urged to take a lot of shortcuts in graphics, and then put some form of temporal anti-aliasing to hide the presence of said shortcuts. Just take TAA off in a lot of mo
Re:New games have gotten worse (Score:4, Interesting)
This ^^, fire up GRID AutoSport, Fallout 3, or BioShock Infinite, set the resolution to 1080p and crank all the other video settings to full - You can this with very modest hardware now. None of those titles will look "dated" run that way. For the most part the game play isnt far removed if at all from current titles either.
We have not had a generational leap forward in capability, since about the xbox360 era really. DLSS might be more than just fancy up-scaling but from what I have seen if you are playing on ~25in display, with keyboard, mouse, and perhaps flight yoke or steering wheel at desk I am just not convinced the experience of going beyond 1080p means much unless you in the super competitive space, for the guy who just wants to kill a couple hours blasting zombies it just does not offer much new.
Until the industry can convince everyone they *want* to play in VR or the hardware can really deliver on fully raytraced environments and super-HD resolution with good frame rates for a truly "photo real" experience the industry is going to have to get used to competing with their own previous titles.
That is a newer experience for them. In the past the technology shifts have pretty much meant that new games always compared pretty favorable to older titles (shovelware excluded). 1987-90's EGA/VGA titles were a great leap over the CGA stuff we mostly had before that. 1993's games were big jump over 1990's etc because machines had enough memory to do more interesting stuff. 1997/8 openGL titles were big leap over 1995s fake 3d sectorized stuff + sprites.
I don't feel we have seen anything quite so dramatic in the last decade. So game from 2014 is going to be just as interesting to someone who hasnt played it before as a newer title.
Re: (Score:2)
The way I see it games have only improved on graphics and became relatively worse on gameplay, plot, enemy AI.
What good are shiny visuals when the game is repetitive or the enemy is so predictable it's like shooting fish in a barrel?
For instance, I like the large space of Far Cry 5, but prefer Far Cry 2 where the opponents at least hide when they realise they're being sniped. And the graphics are just fine.
Or Borderlands 2 which I'm exploring now has good ideas, but suffers also from predictable AI and some
Re: (Score:2)
gameplay matters too. I'll admit I still enjoy Starcraft and dont mind its older nature. I mean Starcraft goes back to the days where LAN parties were IPX based and to get around the blizzard servers you could use the Kali software to emulate IPX over tcp/ip. 1998? sounds about right. Cyberpunk was OK once they fixed the bugs, it had storyline and quests galore. It got a bit too easy when I could jack into the camera system and remote overload someones cybernetics and kill them from outside the building. I
Re: (Score:2)
We've been promised 4K and 8K gaming for years now, yet devs have admitted to being lazy and over rely on DLSS and related technologies and still think 30FPS is acceptable.
The GPU cards can't keep up. Not surprising given CPUs hit their thermal limits on raw single core performance well over a decade ago. There's also the need to have a level playing field for competitive games. (Faster frame generation means more time for input grabbing and network responses. Keeping the framerate low helps ensure a minimum system response time for all players.)
games haven't really improved in graphics
They aren't going to. The displays we have now output more pixels than a human eye is capable of recognizing, and the studios have
Gameplay not Graphics (Score:2)
Despite having much more powerful CPUs and GPUs, games haven't really improved in graphics.
I think that nicely sums up the problem with recent games: they all focus on "wow" graphics because that's a lot easier to achieve that coming up with innovative and fun gameplay combined with a computer opponent who is not easily defeated after a couple of games or who is not insanely hard because it cheats like crazy.
Games that use graphics as a draw have a very short shelf-life because if the only reason you play it is because it looks cool and so there is little replayability. However, make compelli
Re: (Score:2)
Actual reason for this is proliferation of TAA as a crutch for shortcuts. This is why everything nowadays looks so blurry and shitty compared to games from ten years ago.
There's a dev channel that goes into details on enshittification of graphics in games.
https://www.youtube.com/@Threa... [youtube.com]
His first video on topic is just lethal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Word of warning. If you don't have a problem with the way games look now, don't watch that video. You will not be able to unsee the issue, and it will
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics (Score:4, Interesting)
Hidden reason for this is because new games on Steam are usually broken as hell for the first year or so. Say what you will about Nintendo, but Valve could stand to take a page from their book on quality control.
Re: (Score:1)
So? That's no different of a situation from most the titles in Nintendo's store, yet somehow Nintendo manages to hold their 3rd party developers to a higher standard anyway. In many cases these are even the same companies.
This (Score:3)
Hidden reason for this is because new games on Steam are usually broken as hell for the first year or so. Say what you will about Nintendo, but Valve could stand to take a page from their book on quality control.
Exactly this! I see people posting all sorts of rationals for these numbers from steam but none of them match what I'm looking at. Paying good money on a broken game when I could wait 6 months and get the same game but working and likely at discount by this time is just absurd to me. Sure, I'm eager to play a new release of a game I've been waiting for but what's the point if the odds are strongly in favor of it being broken on launch?
If game studios ever want more gamers to buy their games on day one they
Re: (Score:2)
GoG players are even worse (Score:5, Informative)
If you think this is bad, you don't want to look at GoG players. Many of them spend their time playing 20-30 year old games!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Truth! I'm currently playing through a bunch of the old Sierra games from way back (Kings Quest series, Quest for Glory/Hero's Quest/etc).
Re: (Score:2)
And best of all those games can be played without needing to phone home to some server which might not exist after a few years.
Or need a gaming rig with the latest CPU and bloated videocard and then still crawl at times because of the crappy lazy code of the game.
I wish I had the source code and/or map editor for some games so I could fix and change things. That's what I love about Neverwinter Nights for instance, it's actually a D&D framework to build your own adventures. As well as Doom and Quake wher
Re: (Score:2)
SMAC/X (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri) is still in regular rotation on my game box.
"Legacy" can mean 3 months old? (Score:2)
You can't really get much information from this. If I buy a game in Jan 2024 that came out in Dec 2023, that's not "Legacy", that's brand new.
I do wait though in a lot of cases. I don't want to pay full price when I can often get it for 35-60% off within the next 12 or so months. Steam's wishlist makes that easy. Just wait until I'm notified of a sale and see if the price is right yet.
Re: (Score:2)
A really great single-player game with a story can take hours and hours to play through... and have significant replay value afterwards.
But I'm still really only willing to fork over the price of a movie ticket for it, so yeah, I'm not buying ANYTHING new. Game prices are ridiculous. A little bit of patience and you end up having so much more for the same amount of money.
Re: (Score:2)
Skyrim AE bundle is only $11.99!
Re: "Legacy" can mean 3 months old? (Score:2)
I am willing to pay more than a movie ticket because a movie lasts two hours but even a short game is usually at least 20 hours.
I still usually don't because I don't have to, there are cheaper games out there. Or because there is some major flaw I'm not willing to pay for.
Novelty and quality have changed (Score:2)
Home computer games were text-based. Occasionally ASCII. Then very low res monchrome, then a few colours.
Point is, games hit 'good enough' more than a few years ago, and now the engagement comes primarily from the mechanics and story. Better graphics are 'nice' but a more satisfying story with a better interface is more important.
When somebody gets that right, that game is no longer obsolete in a few years because of technological improvement. It will last until somebody makes something better, not just
Re: (Score:2)
nethack is still a awesome game... yes, crap graphics, but it is a game that i return to play every few years, it is fun, hard, challenging and after the initial scare with the interface, it quiet usable ... and yes, it run just fine now as in a 486 cpu 30 years ago
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, and I occasionally play NetTrek or whatever it's called. Retro fun! But most of those old games are just too clunky, slow, and frustrating for nostalgia to make them fun to play for long.
Every once in a while I load up my old Infocom games and it takes about 5-10 minutes before they go right back into storage where they belong.
Every new game has to compete with the corpus (Score:2)
"Steam saw a 70% jump in new game play time" (Score:2)
Before you jump to conclusions, (Score:1)
Anecdotes are not data (Score:2)
I strongly suspect Factorio ate up a bunch of the other 85%. The October re-release basically one-shotted the entire PC-using engineering world. :D
Outlier (Score:2)
[looks at his 14 hours spent on Skyrim this past week]
Buy Games With Replayability (Score:2)
Bad metric is bad (Score:2)
It takes about 70 hours to play through a new single player game, and 400 or more hours to master it to the point that you get most of the achievements, and often times significantly more than that to 100% the game. For multiplayer games they want to keep you playing as long as possible for all the various revenue-generating schemes they use, not to mention the time spent lobbies and such waiting for sessions to start. Outside of normal responsibilities, a typical person is lucky if they have 1000 hours of
Bad year for new releases (Score:2)
Old games are popular (Score:2)
Counter-strike 2 is still one of the most played games. It's ancient.
I still play Baldur's Gate 3, Skyrim, and Morrowind more frequently than anything else in my library. These game companies aren't going to make a lot of money off me if I'm still playing 20 year old games. I probably play Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri about 5 hours every year, not the main thing I play but it's a 25 year old game that I still go back to from time to time.
Online games tend to be very long-lived as long as the servers are kept
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder if CS2 counted as a 'new' game for this statistic. Since, it was released in 2024 (I think?).
It is just an in-place replacement for CS:GO, which is very old, but it is technically new.
Too expensive.and controlled. (Score:2)
A lot of games are coming out in incomplete states with the idea they'll patch them / update them later but still want a fuck ton of money. 80$ for an incomplete game, even a full game is a lot of money. Too much where they take stuff out of a complete game, call it DLC and use it as a sales bumper with crap like day one DLC or shortly after. DLC used to be 'We put everything we could into this game to make it great, and since so many people love it, we're going to get working on a project to expand it and
The price of new games surely impacts the figures? (Score:2)
I never buy new Steam games because their price is usually quite high - $50 or more for a AAA game for example. Anyone fiscally sensible and having some modicum of patience simply waits for the game to be made available far cheaper, whether that's in a Steam (or third party offerimg Steam keys) sale, it turns up in a bundle (e.g. Humble Choice, Humble Bundle or Fanatical) or ends up as a freebie on Prime Gaming, Epic Games Store, GoG or Fanatical.
While you're waiting for that one stupidly expensive AAA Stea
Trailing edge (Score:2)
I never play new games, because I'm a cheap bastard who always waits for a sale. The game will be just as entertaining a couple years from now but at 1/3rd the price. (It helps that I only play single-player games, so it doesn't matter to me if everyone else has already moved on to the new hotness. Obviously this doesn't work if you're looking for fully-populated servers.)
Basically, I'm this guy [xkcd.com].
Re: (Score:2)
The game will be just as entertaining a couple years from now but at 1/3rd the price.
Even better you can also avoid the high-priced duds. I dodged Starfield that way...