Steam users have spent $19 billion on games they have never played.
Steam users have spent $19 billion on games they have never played.
Whether it’s Diablo 4, Cyberpunk 2077, or Red Dead Redemption 2, our collective Steam pile of shame is worth enough to buy a country.
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.
145I'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.
15agreed 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.
2
I have a large collection of unplayed games, and most of them came from Humble Bundle.
74This 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...
26I 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.
5Same, but also add Fanatical and game giveaways.
1
Haha whaaattt... Nobody actually does that...haha, that would be like, just kinda silly right...
glances nervously at Steam library
47Like...each of us...right?
32Yes individually. XD
7
I don't want to talk about it
29This is bullshit analysis. People can buy their steam keys from endless sources and sales. Some games that would have been $20+ some people can get for as little as $0.50 depending on circumstances.
It'd be impossible to calculate how much has been spent. They also just straight multiplied the amount of public ones instead of better estimating that using data they had.
All you can do is say how much they are currently or were worth. Considering how steep the price drops can be for many games, it's a pretty wide range of possibilities and makes estimating this fairly worthless.
Just a deliberately bullshit headline made by idiots wielding "data science" hype.
25Exactly. I almost never pay full price on Steam, and I add a lot of keys from Humble or Fanatical bundles where I only intend to play half or so.
So yeah, I'm guessing it's actually 10% or so of that figure if we make a few rules:
- count bundles as a single game, and if one game is played from it, that counts for the whole bundle
- assume games added to Steam are part of a bundle (perhaps in groups of 5)
- don't count games that were ever given away free
- assume all games were purchased at a discount
That would probably get us pretty close to the real number.
8
Yeah, guilty as charged and I don't even mind.
I buy the games on sale if I play them then good for me, if I don't then I supported developers. I see no problem here.
25I'll play them eventually. I will. Stop harassing me!
19Saving them for my retirement. (I will probably only retire when my health is so poor that it is clear that I won't outlive my retirement resources.)
3
I have stopped buying games that aren't on 90% off sales, and even then mostly stopped. I only buy a game that I want to play immediately. I have way too much to do and play and it's not worth building a backlog since I'll just forget it anyways.
Long gone are the days of super sales where 75-95% off were common.
Edit: clarification: I buy very cheap games for my backlog and buy games full price as long as I want to play them right now.
17Steam just had a 90% off sale from an entire publisher. Right now, looking at the stores front page there is
86% off a call of the wild
70% off hell pie.
90% off dragon age.
85% off a worms game.
75% off blasphemous.
90% off another dragon age game.
80% off kingdom Come.
75% off riders Republic.
90% off team17 games.You're yelling at clouds, old man.
35The key thing indeed is to only buy what you need right now. This philosophy is also very helpful in other areas of lives to avoid wasting money on discounts (elg buying clothes you’ll never wear).
I’d rather pay full price for a game I start laying immediately, than to put something 90% off in my backlg, with no guarante I’ll ever play it.
2There are a few games that you might miss out on with this method. Some devs (it's not many) list their games at what they think is a fair forever price and will not ever offer the game at a reduced price. Again, this isn't a lot of devs, but one notable one is Wube, makers of Factorio.
I generally agree with your method, mostly because I have a large enough backlog to be able to wait for sales, but it is also worth doing research on some devs to see if a sale will ever happen.
2Corrected my first post. I don't just but deep sales. I only buy games at full price of marginal sales if I want to play them immediately.
1
Steam Summer Sale starts in 2 days. You know what to do!
16It’s me, hi! I’m the problem, it’s me!
15... I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror
4It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero
2
this is what i have been saying all along
13Just 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.
19Also 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.
1
Wondering how much the budle deals effect this number. I've got a lot of games from bundles and a lot of them I didn't really want but they came with the bundle, so they're added to my library.
13This is it. I have a ton from humble bundle and free keys. Very few I've paid for and never played.
6
Gaben has now got 19 Billion dollars he’ll never spend.
12This 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.
12If 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.
4
I’ll play them when I get the time. I never get any time :(
11And I'll do it again.
11I think the summer sale starts tomorrow, definitely gonna add a few more to the old backlog lol
1
I'm part of the problem.
11I knew I'd get called out some day. Bastards.
10Why do they have to personally attack me like that?
8I'll do it again.
6I think about 18 billion of that was me
6Humble 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...
6Same. 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...
2
Finally, a customer base for my games
6I have over a thousand games in my library (almost all from sales) and yeah... I've probably played less than 5% of them. I'm a collector? 😅
5Many of my unplayed games are PC remasters of old console games I played at a younger age. I played the games, I just haven’t played them on steam.
5
5The games I haven't played yet are also the games I never paid full price for, or got in a bundle, heavily discounted.
51700 games
I don't have anything to play!
5I 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.
4I 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.
4I 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.
2
Now THAT'S the economy.
4Same
4Too busy, never played.
3Yeah, and?
3I'm doing my part!
2The problem is that you pay $20-30 for a game that ends up sucking when you finally get to play it 2 months later which is past Steam's refund date. If you never play it, it may still be a fun game and not a bad decision. Schrodinger's game.
2Gaben be like "Sounds like a seventh yacht to me!"
2I have 1048 games in my dynamic wall of shame list which is games I have never started.
2They probably saved 30 billion through sales and got even more worth out of finding the games they really enjoy that they may have never even tried without the sales.
I can confidently say that I spend less per year on games now than 25 years ago, very rarely regret a purchase, and don't bother with refunds (which I hear are easy) because if I buy three games for cheap and spend all my time on one then I got my money's worth.
Hell, I spend less each year than my wife spends on switch games and get way more entertainment out of it.
1So does that compensate for all those pirated games that people actually do play?
1and 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.
-4I'll glady pay a 30% tax to play on linux and have the steam client
1This 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.
1
