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Steam Gamers Spend Just 15% of Time on New Releases (pcgamer.com) 74

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
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.

Steam Gamers Spend Just 15% of Time on New Releases More | Reply

Steam Gamers Spend Just 15% of Time on New Releases

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  • No no no (Score:2, Insightful)

    by i kan reed ( 749298 )

    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:4, Insightful)

      by Avantare ( 573582 ) on Friday December 20, 2024 @10:39AM (#65028349)
      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?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by TWX ( 665546 )

        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.

        • New games cost money or otherwise had to be somehow acquired.
        • New games might not have had all the trappings required for support working right.
        • New games had a chicken-and-egg problem, if no users the no users would transition.
        • New games on the same gaming engine might offer

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by e3m4n ( 947977 )

        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

      • I agree that most modern AAA games are garbage, but there are still a lot of great new indie games being released. Hell, "boomer shooters" has become an entire genre to separate newly-created old-school shooters from the AAA slop. With so many games being released, I'm perfectly happy to buy them discounted and play them years after release, the games are just as fun. I've had a rule that I'll only buy a game if it's under $10 until I've played through all of my queue, I feel like I've been doing this for a

      • I get some new games. But I don't always play them immediately. I get them if on sale, or I'm pretty sure they're good, but that doesn't mean I'm going to jump on them immediately. This isn't a console subscription service for kids where everyone plays whatever offered game is there that month, or whatever the latest fashion is amongst their friends. Steam gamers are not the same as XBox or PlayStation gamers. That shouldn't surprise people, but apparently some game companies haven't figured that out.

      • It's plenty here, you and most people just refuse to believe it because you're human. Statistically as we age we get more and more afraid of trying new things, preferring the tried and true to the risk of disappointment. Of course you can't actually believe that of yourself, it must be "the industry" or "damned kids these days". Ahh for the "good old days".
    • I'm not sure that they'll end up going after Valve to get the results; but it's arguably the case that we've already seen the (really annoying) adaptation:

      "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
    • I'm sure that I'm not the only one who has more games that I want to play but haven't gotten to yet that unless a new title is really amazing (BG3 for example) then it gets added to a queue that I might get to eventually. I've got enough of a backlog that there are titles from five years ago that I still want to play, but haven't had the time to yet. Stop me from buying and "older" game and you've probably lost a sale. I've got plenty in my Steam library that I could play again instead of buying something n

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      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.

    • As the 800lb gorilla, Valve DGAF. They have been instituting consumer friendly labeling requirements regarding DRM and such and there is no exodus.

      • Yeah, but also as the 800 pound gorilla its in their interest to keep selling more games, yeah?

      • Valve don't really have consistent direction in consumer friendly/unfriendly stakes. They'll print DRM requirements on the store page but they'll allow publishers to "update" that at a later date with no recourse for the paying customer whose client force updated and now is borked. The meme is that Gaben in the face of pressure to change simply does nothing and wins, well doing "nothing" would have kept them consumer friendly but they caved to publishers who don't want players on older, better versions of c

    • I think this is why streaming services will stop offering older titles a lot of the time.

      That said, examining my recent games:
      2015, 2009, 2007, 2022, 2021, 2017

      Zero 2024 releases, 3 older than 8 years, 3 between 2 and 7 years.

      I can get older games for a lot less money, there's a huge catalog that I can pick through for actually fun games, bugs have probably been addressed (though start reappearing if old enough), and there's less stuff like microtransactions or requirements to be "always online".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Lehk228 ( 705449 )
      not as long as my man GabeN is alive

  • New games have gotten worse (Score:3)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Friday December 20, 2024 @10:33AM (#65028331)
    Despite having much more powerful CPUs and GPUs, games haven't really improved in graphics. 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. Just like Chromium took over the internet, independent graphic engines got weeded out most devs just use the bloaty Unreal engine. It's no wonder people are playing games back when real care was put into the code. This is why we need to legalize piracy of delisted games, to stop revisionist developers hiding old work.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      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:3)

      by jma05 ( 897351 )

      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:New games have gotten worse (Score:4, Informative)

        by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Friday December 20, 2024 @02:32PM (#65028941)

        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 modern games, and you'll see a lot of crap. Jittering, poor texture and geometry quality, things like vegetation and hair being done in a hilariously bad manner, etc.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jma05 ( 897351 )

          They are massively better if you discount the fact that they are now sold in much higher segments, RTX 4090 is a 450W TDP GPU and RTX 5090 is rumored to be a 600W TDP GPU. RTX 5090 is expected to be $2000 - $2500. At the conventional segments, they have improved much slowly.

          At the same price point and TDP, there has been only about a 220% improvement over the last 8 years in the segment that I buy (mid-range). That is very low when compared to increments from the previous 8 years.

      • The CPUs and GPUs did get better. Okay perhaps not the doubling in single core speeds we had in the 90s, but as someone who recently replaced a 9 year old machine that was top end at the time, shit's fast now, yo. What happened though was that the graphics programming all but went away and now every game is using software generated shaders from gui tools driven by artists who will just keep layering effects until they get the look they want to be stuck on models cranked out by asset farms who don't care a j

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jma05 ( 897351 )

          Yes, the software has gotten worse, but so has hardware. The rate of hardware performance increases have fallen to half the previous rate. Vendors have only compensated by doubling both TDP and price, especially in case of GPUs.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jma05 ( 897351 )

          And yes, upgrading after 9-10 years is obviously going to show major performance improvement, but you used to see that difference in 5 years previously.

    • Re:New games have gotten worse (Score:4, Interesting)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Friday December 20, 2024 @11:15AM (#65028437) Journal

      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.

    • 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)

      by e3m4n ( 947977 )

      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

    • 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

    • 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:3)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      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

      • You know what the worst thing about that Threat Interactive video? Unless I misunderstood what he said, that shouty man isn't even a "real" engine developer, he just knows enough and has read enough white papers to know a bit more about how NOT to ruin your game in UE than so many other "I'm a real developer" users out there. He's the person I'd have decried as a point and drool GUI tool user and yet he understands the problem significantly better than the people hired to make high budget crapware for big s

    • I think graphics still get better, but the gameplay is what isn't improving, and often is going backwards.

  • Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Narcocide ( 102829 ) on Friday December 20, 2024 @10:34AM (#65028333) Homepage

    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.

    • 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

    • You obviously haven't looked at the Switch store in a long while.
    • You forgot about waiting for sales too. Obligatory xkcd [xkcd.com]

      Lately I have been waiting for games to drop Denuvo. Why pay money for bugs and invasion of privacy that will resolve themselves when the developer changes their mind?

  • GoG players are even worse (Score:5, Informative)

    by Hentes ( 2461350 ) on Friday December 20, 2024 @10:53AM (#65028371)

    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!

    • That's me! Total Annihilation is still a kickass game from 1997.

    • 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).

    • 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)

      by Gilmoure ( 18428 )

      SMAC/X (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri) is still in regular rotation on my game box.

  • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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)

      by higuita ( 129722 )

      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

      • 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.

  • of all games released on the platform for the past couple of decades, and newer games doesn't always mean "better"
  • The need to learn how to properly lie, err market, statistics.
  • Take a look at the top 10 games at any given point. Dota2, CS2, GTAV, Rust, PubG, Apex Legends... And wallpaper engine.

  • 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

  • [looks at his 14 hours spent on Skyrim this past week]

  • I have have about 1,500 hours in Conan Exhles, likely because the player can building castles, and rebuild temple ruins, and well, who doesn't want a summer vacation home in in what looks like Angkor Wat, or a snowy vacation home in the Himalayas? My friends still play Guild Wars 2. I still play Thief 2, which several hundred good add-on missions. Quake 2 in RTX is still fun. I may even dust off Half-Life 1.

  • 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

  • This year was poisoned by Steam releases that asked you to make accounts on other services, which I refuse, or plagued with Denuvo DRM which I will not tolerate.

  • 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)

      by Anil ( 7001 )

      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.

  • 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

  • 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:4, Insightful)

    by Chelloveck ( 14643 ) on Friday December 20, 2024 @01:42PM (#65028835)

    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].

    • 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...

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        And you stand a good chance all the major bugs have been resolved!

  • Add in modern stuff like fan patches with new translations, analog stick mods, bugfixes etc. on top of emulator save states, and speedup, it turns say a PS2 game into a slightly different experience with a lot less time wasted. t's hard to overstate how easy and rewarding it is now to play old games. (cough vimm cough)

    On steam you can even point to a windows-only emulator exe file as an external game and run it with Proton, which will run windows-only emulators like xenia (for xbox 360). Maybe it won't be p

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