36.9% of all Steam games are never played.Follow

And lots of other interesting numbers in this article on ArsTechnica

The pie chart showing the data in the title:


More charts (but no pie charts) in the article for those who can't be bothered to read.

Yeah, I have lots of bundle games that I bought for some other title. I'm sure those help mess up the ratio.

But I also have games I intentionally bought years ago and still haven't played

At an average price of maybe $2 a game, I'm fine with getting a couple hours out of it. Heck, I'm fine with trying a game and deciding "I'm not liking this" and dropping it since my investment in it is so low.

For sure, you really can't go wrong for a buck or two.

It's just there's so many games out there that are good, that it just doesn't seem worth the time to take a risk on something. There's no shortage of award winning or well reviewed titles out there that I've never played but are basically sure bets to get many hours of fun out of, and by the time I finish with my current game there'll be a bunch more created that I'll never have the time to play as well. It's like a multimillionaire buying a scratch ticket or at 7/11 or something.

Honestly, I'm just really surprised it isn't higher.

Well, not everyone binges on indie bundles.

Edited, Apr 16th 2014 11:36am by Jophiel

I have 111 steam games. I've played about 5 of them...

They're just so damn cheap when they go on sale...

I've never bought a bundle and still damn near half of my games have 1 hour or less in them. A few because the controls were bad, Civ because I couldn't be bothered to do a tutorial, wound up completely and utterly lost and quit to never start it up again and the Batman Arkham Asylum & City because I'm not bored with Borderlands yet. Then again for every game under 1 hour there's a game with 100+ hours in my steam library.

I have a lot of games friends have gifted my account in hopes I will get on and play with them. I may have logged into some of them for a minute or two before getting bored, especially when said friends never actually play the game they invited me to.

Probably true, still I've paid less than €5 for all but one of the games I've barely played so it's not like it was a big financial drain either.

I have bought almost all of the Humble Bundle bundles, I've only played a hand full of the games :3

I have 22 games on Steam, average playtime is 40.7 hours. 37 avg on action games (e.g. HL2, Bioshock Infinite), 41 on stealth games (Deus Ex, Dishonored), 44 on RPGs, 82 on sandbox (New Vegas, Skyrim, Amalur) and 171 for strategy (EU 4, Shogun).

Yeah, I know you were dying for a statistical breakdown of my gaming habits by genre, you're welcome. Side-note, it'd be cool if there was a stats tab in Steam to compile this kind of data for you. I'm sure Allegory would agree.

I only have two Steam games I've never played - Darksiders 2, bought bundled with #1 which, it turns out, I didn't much care for; and Spiral Knights, which I'm pretty sure someone gifted me out of a multipack and which we never got around to. Normally I give a game at least a couple of hours before I decide I despise it.

Apart from bundles, which've already been mentioned, there are a bunch of f2p games, very short indie games where 2 hours is game over; hell, Portal is what, 5 hours long? Steam also counts things like Half Life: Lost Coast (a 10 minute tech demo level packaged with the orange box), beta clients and some expansion packs as separate games. It'd be interesting to know how much money most people spend on unplayed games.

I still have my Bioshock: Infinite, FarCry 3: Blood Dragon, and Tomb Raider codes from one of those AMD Reloaded bonuses. I should have just sold them when I got them.