36.9% of Steam games never get played

A report compiled by Ars Technica shows that 36.9% of games bought and registered on Steam have never been played.

The site used used a random sample of the approximately 172 million publicly-accessible Steam profile pages to generate the information, gathering data from up to 90,000 profiles per day for “about two months”. The report goes on to show that a further 41.6% of games have been played less than 10 hours by purchasers.

This corroborates a recent survey by Kotaku in which gamers said they did not play 40% of the games they bought on Steam. It can also be linked to a Steam based report from GDC 2014 that only 1 in 3 players finish the games they start.

Based on the sample results, the report went on to estimate the 10 most popular games on Steam, according to how many owners each title had, as seen below.

Dota 2 – 25.9 million;
Team Fortress 2 – 20.3 million;
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast – 12.7 million;
Counter Strike: Source – 11.9 million;
Half-Life 2: Deathmatch – 11 million;
Left for Dead 2 – 10.7 million;
Counter Strike – 9.7 million;
Half-Life 2 – 8 million;
Portal – 7.3 million;
Counter Strike: Cond. Zero – 7.1 million.

What is interesting to note is that, although their owner numbers are high, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and Half-life 2: Deathmatch have not been played by 10.7 million and 8.3 million of their owners, respectively.

Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 outshine the competition in the play department, too, with all their estimated owners having played the game at least once. Dota 2 also takes top spot when it comes to how many hours it has been played: a staggering 3.8 billion.

The MOBA does not take first place when it comes to how many hours gamers, on average, play their favourite title. That honour goes to Football Manager 2014, whose owners have each spent and average of 169 hours on the management sim.

Do you play all your Steam games? Let us know in the comments and forum.