Just about every app you use will be serving up its own equivalent of Spotify Wrapped right about now. This morning the New York Times Puzzle app humiliated me with the news that I mostly solve yellow first in Connections, and my average Wordle guess rate is 3.97. Thanks for that. Also joining in once more is Steam, with its fourth annual Steam Replay, summarizing your year in PC gaming with fun stats and details on every game you played. And if you’re a part of the vast majority, that won’t be including any games from 2025. In fact, nearly half of you will have dodged games released since 2017.
Alongside your own stats and details, Steam Replay measures you against the average Steam user, and in doing so reveals some extraordinary statistics about how people really play games. So where the page tells you about how many achievements you unlocked this year, it’ll compare that to the median of just 11, or how the average longest streak of days on which games are played is only 6. Then there’s the really astonishing fact that the median user of Steam plays just four games a year.
Not “buys” but “plays.” And given the frequent Steam sales that mean squillions of games are available for as little as a dollar, and the ease with which multiple free games can be played, to get an average as low as four suggests vast numbers of Steam users are playing far, far fewer than that.
Then comes perhaps the most shocking statistic. Where you’re told how much time you spent playing games released in 2025 (mine was 58 percent), you’re told that the average percentage is just 14. Of all the time all Steam users (estimated to be around 185 million people in September 2024) play games, just a seventh is on a game from this year.
But it gets more extraordinary. 40 percent of playtime from all Steam users is spent in games released eight or more years ago, with 44 percent spent in games one to seven years old. Now, that doesn’t directly correlate to 84 percent of people only playing ages-old games, but it demonstrates a strong bias toward them olden days. Given that Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and PUGB dominate the top of the Most Played Games data by some margin on a daily basis, perhaps this shouldn’t be quite so surprising, but it still feels bonkers.
These numbers do seem to swing around a little wildly. Last year it was 37 percent of time spent with eight-year-old games and 15 percent with new releases, and you might suggest it makes sense for this to have slightly shifted with a bunch more games slipping into the 8+-years-old range, but then jump back to 2022 and a colossal 64 percent of time was spent with the oldest games, and only 19 percent on games from one to seven years back. Wild stuff.
I’ve done my best to counter this with 205 games played, of which 183 were new in 2025, but then I’m perhaps rather cheating by this being my job. But seriously, people, there are so many great new games to try! Yes, get your Dota time in, but please make sure not to miss out on, you know, [broad sweeping gesture to the entirety of Kotaku‘s output].
