- 15% of Steam customers’ playtime devoted to 2024 video games
- 47% of playtime on video games as much as eight years outdated
- Many causes for this, together with extra older video games to play
Steam’s end-of-the-year evaluate has all the time revealed some fascinating PC gaming tendencies and this 12 months’s isn’t any exception. In keeping with 2024’s stats, solely 15% of Steam customers spent their complete enjoying time on video games that launched in 2024.
Wanting additional on the knowledge that PC Gamer stories on, 47% of the full enjoying time on Steam was spent on video games launched within the final seven years, whereas 37% of that point was spent on video games that launched eight years or extra in the past. Now the query is, why and what does this imply?
One attainable rationalization is that players might be focusing extra on their backlogs slightly than new releases. We do know that playtime for present releases is increased this 12 months than in 2023, as there was a rise from 9% to fifteen%, which suggests gamers are shopping for new titles at the least. There are different potentialities for this pattern as properly.
Different potentialities for this statistic
One cause might be that older video games are simpler to entry because of their cheaper costs, particularly as a result of many Steam gross sales. There’s additionally the affect of the Steam Deck and what’s thought of ‘Steam Deck playable,’ since many current AAA video games could also be too demanding for a transportable PC.
There’s additionally the truth that older stay service video games like Counter-Strike, Dota 2, and PUBG have made up Steam’s Most Performed charts, whereas newer titles have an extremely troublesome time breaking by way of and constructing a participant base.
Another excuse is that Steam has over 200,000 titles launched over the course of many years, in comparison with the comparatively paltry 18,000 video games launched in 2024 based on SteamDB. So naturally, extra customers will spend extra time enjoying older video games versus current ones.
Regardless, 15% of playtime devoted to new video games is slightly spectacular, in comparison with 2022’s 17% stat. It signifies that the numbers are recovering after the huge dip in 2023. Hopefully subsequent 12 months we’ll see one other enhance, as players delve into extra new titles.
