In monetary terms, it’s a surprisingly large amount of money when you add up the number of games we have in our Steam library that we haven’t spent a minute with and add up their value.

Steam’s summer sale kicked off on June 27 and is scheduled to run through July 11 on Gabe Newell’s digital platform. It’s likely that many people will purchase games during these ten days to add to the selection of games available on Steam. However, many games will end up not even being downloaded from Valve’s servers, leaving them unplayed in our libraries with zero minutes of playtime…

PCGamesN dug into the data they have on the Steam ID Finder. It’s a site that tracks data on public Steam accounts so they can tally up the number of hours played, the number of games owned, and which ones gave them the most bang for their buck. Only 10% of Steam IDs, or about 73 million, are public, but from the data, PCGamesN calculated that the value of unplayed games is $1.9 billion. Multiply that by ten and the estimated value of unplayed titles is $19 billion!

Of course, this does not take into account games that have been started but not finished (the question is what is considered finished: those that got to the credits or those that got all their achievements), but it is better this way because then you would surely be thinking in astronomical amounts. Probably many of the unplayed games are open-world or RPG games, because you can spend as much time as possible on them without realizing how much time has passed, which is probably why people have not started them. They are probably waiting for more free time, but maybe that moment in their lives has never really arrived, so they have just accumulated a so-called backlog of untouched games.

And maybe the $19 billion could be even more, because it’s just an average.

Source: GameRant, PCGamesN, Steam ID Finder