Mine was higher, but they were all indie games.
Me too: AAA games are just kinda shit these days, which is kind of a slap in the face given the skyrocketing prices. Plus there’s invasive shit a lot of them started using in the name of anticheat.
The appeal of AAA games was killed long ago by corporate greed.
Same, there were lots of good indie games this year!
I think my SO was 90% new games but they were all Indi
There are lots of good indie games every year, just have to find them!
Same here, like 55% 2025 titles. So many cool indie games this year. Megabonk, Schedule 1, Expedition 33, etc…
78% for me, thanks Expedition 33 and depression making it near impossible to enjoy anything else
I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was only 10% due to the massive backlog available.
Edit: Just checked and my playtime for 2025 games was 2% which is probably lower than last year as the top two games this year were my same two top games from last year.
Yeah, I’d be more curious about the past three years combined. I know several friends still playing BG3 because they haven’t had time to finish it. As backlogs grow I feel like this will only become more common.
Eh, yeah, only 14%? 2025 is just one year, and there are so many good choices already. Decades of masterpieces often on sale for 5,- vs 1 year of games yet to prove themselves. Last year was about 15%, 2023 9% and 2022 about 17%, going on the previous replays. so i guess in that context you could say ‘only’ 14%.
That percentage only matters in comparison to previous years, otherwise it’s just a random number.
While the article doesn’t give a lot of info, it does say it’s only down 1% from last year.
2025: 14%
2024: 15%
2023: 9%
2022: 17%There’s room to be concerned with those numbers.
Honestly with that small of a sample size those numbers could mean anything.
Wed need to know things like:
- How many hours worth of new game content was released (maybe there were only enough new games to make up 20% of playtime)
- How mich do Games as a Service impact things (they get new content, but aren’t “new” games)
- Are people playing games more or less (people could be playing new games the same amount, but increasing the amount of hours playing old games)
A small sample of averages is really hard to interpret.
So last year was 15%? That’s 1 percentage point, but you could also say it’s down 6.7%, although we don’t have precise numbers to work with
That’s just how the article phrased it, surprisingly it’s hard to find historical “Steam Replay” stats so it’s hard to confirm/expand on any of this.
Mine was 0% for new games. They were all older ones
I didn’t play a single 2025 release.
Mudborne and Slime Rancher 2 were pretty good.
I played Blue Prince, Split Fiction and Death Stranding 2. And one of those was just because it was on PSPlus. Everything else was several years old.
I have Expedition 33 but haven’t got around to playing it yet, because I’m playing the Silent Hill 2 Remake.
I’ve said this elsewhere, but December is quickly becoming the time of the year when all the corpos tell us just exactly how much they spy on us and we all collectively go “Cool!” and tell each other about it for some reason.
FWIW, the median number of games played is four. Not forty, not fourteen, just four. If we’re going to get spyware stats, at least let’s put them in context. As it turns out, half of all Steam users are only playing the one game (given the numbers we know on concurrents, that’d be CS2/DOTA/PUBG or Apex, in most cases).
The play-everything, strong-opinion-haver user is a fraction of the userbase.
Also interesting, Steam is telling people how their playtime splits between Windows/Deck/Non-Deck Linux… but they pointedly don’t share those stats platform-wide. Sometimes silence is data, too.
The stats they show are pretty basic usage stats many are in the UI already. No one is showing the actual valuable data they are harvesting.
They aren’t really hiding the OS stats, it’s regularly published in the hardware and software survey. Showing my steam deck time is over the average of 0% isn’t really surprising news.
Nnnnah, the hardware survey is a wildly different number. That’s what OS each account was using when they filled the survey.
This shows they have data on what OS each user is using at the time of running each game, on both a per-game and a per-hour basis and that they can tie all of it to each account across games and OSs. Which raises the question of why they run the hardware survey OS numbers in the first place, but I suppose if you’re sharing the survey results you share the survey results, even if you have more accurate data on the same stats elsewhere.
That’d be a very interesting, very different stat, though, because it means they know what percentage of Windows/Linux users go back and forth, and CAN separate Linux usage from Deck from other OSs, which they very pointedly do not do on the survey, where SteamOS doesn’t have its own entry. That’s unsurprising but notable, along with the fact that they don’t really report on their own hardware sales, either, despite being a main source of info about GPU and CPU vendors.
Steam OS is listed in the survey, it’s 26% of Linux os use.
Tracking game use by device id isn’t that crazy, the steam app should know what OS it’s installed on.
Is it listed? Do you have a link to that? Checking the latest survey the Linux section shows
“Arch Linux” 64 bit 0.32% +0.01%
Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit 0.24% +0.04%
Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit 0.14% 0.00%
Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS 64 bit 0.12% +0.01%
I don’t see a SteamOS segment listed as a non-Linux OS anywhere, either. If they do provide the info I’d love to see it, but it doesn’t seem to be shown at a glance in the OS Version category.
Tracking game use by device isn’t any more or less “crazy” than anything else they store. It’s just telemetry. It’s noteworthy that they share it in the format that they share it.
It’s only listed if you filter to Linux. It’s called steamOS Holo 64 bit.
Oh, hey, it is. Why the hell would it work that way? It seems to be manually excluded from the unfiltered list despite being by far the biggest usage.
So the data exists but it’s weirdly buried for no reason.
Still, thanks for the pointer. I genuinely didn’t know they had it set up that way.
Could be weirdness, or oversight, or maybe optimistically trying to quietly encourage Linux usage outside of Steam Deck? Who knows.
Would you be willing to share why you don’t like the “corpo spying”? I personally never understood - an online service has to know your requests in order to serve the results to you, and keeping revords of those requests is the only way to have personalized recommendations, which I would rather have than be served ads for games (or music or whatever) I’ll never even consider.
I’d say I’m more lenient about big data profiles than most people around here. I’d also say I understand why the reaction to the very real, very obvious overreach in the process of creating and using those profiles is radically opposed to any sort of personal recorded info.
The part that’s weird is the cute little exception we make around the December holidays to get weirdly invasive infographics to share on social media.
For the record, I’d dispute that I prefer personalized recs to general ads. I already know the things I like that I want to buy. I’d much rather get a poke on things “I’d never consider”.
I was on some social media site today and noted that there are some controversies going on where I only ever see the pushback and entirely infer that the people holding the opposite stance do exist, but they never show up in my channels. This is not unexpected in an algorithmically curated info landscape… but it’s kind of bad and dangerous.
Ditto for only ever being served media based on the media I already like. Again, obvious but important: that’s decidedly NOT how I got to like the media I already like.
Regarding social media feeds, I have mixed opinions, because you’re right about the echo chamber, but I also am only still on any mainstream platform for the memes, and I only want it to show me memes, which it wouldn’t do if not for personalized recommendations.
As for games, I don’t want my recommendations to be dominated by whatever has the biggest marketing budget and can take over my feed. I mostly play indie games, and I think if my store page wasn’t personalized, I wouldn’t see nearly as many small games as I do.
I mean, you do you, but I don’t see any of the things that you want requiring active surveillance. That all seems very attainable by having decent search, filtering and categorization tools.
If anything, I find myself now seeking “hidden gems on Steam” despite Steam knowing everything about my gaming habits. And that’s on Steam, which does have a semi-decent crowdsourced tagging and categorization system. Their main page recommendations for e have consistently been either generically popular shovelware or insistent recommendations for games I do like but already own in other platforms that I can’t tell Steam to stop shoving down my throat.
Looks like this year I played exactly 0 new games. But what steam doesn’t know is that in September I started Cyberpunk on GOG and haven’t dropped it since. Has to be my game of the year now.
Cyberpunk isn’t a new release though. It might be new to you, but it still wouldn’t count for new releases.
I framed that a bit weird, what I meant is that as far as steam and the stats are concerned I disappeared off the face of the earth for the last 4 months, when in fact another old game has consumed me.
I don’t doubt the numbers on this scale, but my personal numbers are absolutely not correct, so it does make me wonder how accurate things are.
There’s some long term bug with Steam in the way they compute playtime. About 4 years ago, I purchased a game, played it once for probably less than an hour and never picked it up again. Steam shows I have played that game for almost 3,000 hours.
This year, similar thing happened, but not to the same extreme. There was a game demo I downloaded, played through the first level (which IIRC was all that was available at the time in that demo), and now it’s showing I played that game for over 100 hours. I probably spent 30 minutes with it at most.
Curious what’s going on there or if anybody else has experienced that? Maybe it’s not a widespread thing, but certainly curious that it’s happened to me twice.
Do not have the same problem, but some stuff is wrong in my replay too. Like I’ve played a game in December, and even right before steam replay started and it shows up in November for some reason and some games are missing, and I am always online.
I haven’t even bought a game released in 2025. I think these stats are showing a real problem for the gaming industry in general. It’s probably a better use of resources to continue supporting a years old game with moderate popularity than making another new game.
Do we know what valve defines “release” as?
This has come up a lot over the years but between “early access” games that launch in borderline beta form and live games that never leave it (and if you see a similarity between those: congrats, you now understand how important marketing is)… what is the actual difference between a fully new release and a game that just got a major update with 10 hours of story content?
This semi-famously came up back pre-pandemic when Alex Navarro made a fairly impassioned soapbox about Fire Pro World and how if they didn’t discuss it for Giant Bomb’s GOTY the year it entered EA then they never would… and then was immediately shut down. Although Jeff Gerstmann has often talked about how GOTY discussions are really just shopper’s guides and he has always approached them from that perspective.
They only count the official release date on Steam. DLC/expansions don’t count even if they are new releases, which I consider pretty odd. My report shows zero new games played, yet I played two expansions that came out this year.
Only 2% new releases for me. Literally just Peak and then a couple of trials for games like Trails in the Sky, all of which individually account for <1% of my total play time this year.
I had a bit of playtime in civ vii (literally only on release and then never touched it again lol) and peak (amazing coop) which were 2025 releases, but yeah, most of my playtime was definitely older titles that I picked up on sale.
Spider-Man remastered (fantastic), hitman (also great), dredge (short but fun), red dead redemption2, and a bunch of older indies accounted for the lions share of my playtime.
