There doesn’t seem to have been a single game released this year that has significantly engaged the community of gamers who have chosen Valve’s platform.
Steam’s year-end recap tends to throw up a lot of interesting data, and this trend is set to continue in 2024. For some, the Steam Replay page doesn’t load at all (with an error message), while for others, the stats come up without a hitch. We could do a micro-analysis per player, but let’s look further afield – a macro-analysis reveals much more relevant and exciting results.
In 2024, players spent only 15% of their time on this year’s games. This is very low. And the time spent on titles released in the last 1-7 years is 47%, and considering that, for example, Baldur’s Gate 3, which we wrote about, is being played even more this year than last year, this seems even more logical. In the 2023 summary, the share of new games was only 9%, and in 2022 it was 17%, so it’s a pretty volatile result from year to year…
A few online games certainly boosted the 2024 result. Helldivers II for example, but also Delta Force, which got a bit of attention due to a translation error. There’s also the king of mouse-killers, Banana (which is about as much a game as we are a literary publication). Among the single-player titles, Chinese Game Science’s successful Black Myth: Wukong must have made a big push in the 2024 releases…
However, the state of live service games may have held back the results somewhat. Several games took the largest percentage of players, and all of them are older titles such as DotA 2, Counter-Strike 2 (formerly Counter-Strike: Global Offensive), and PUBG Battlegrounds (aka PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds), which often appear on Steam’s most-played list. Meanwhile, Ubisoft is struggling with Skull & Bones, and Game Over has already been announced for XDefiant… while Path of Exile 2 and Marvel Rivals are off to a good start.
Steam already has over 200,000 games, with about 18,000 released this year according to SteamDB. And that’s a lot of games released in a pretty busy year…
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