Valve’s 12 months In Evaluation for Steam not too long ago launched, and revealed an attention-grabbing metric about its platform’s playerbase.
Subsequent to a breakdown of the video games customers performed this 12 months is a factoid that solely 15 p.c of Steam gamers spent their time on video games launched in 2024. Conversely, 47 p.c of gamers devoted their time to video games from the previous 1-7 years (or “current favorites”), and 37 p.c performed titles from eight or extra years in the past (“classics”).
For comparability, 17 p.c of Steam customers performed 2022’s then-current video games, and 2023 was decrease at 9 p.c. The ratio of current favorites for 2022 and 2023 have been 19 p.c and 52 p.c, respectively, and classics for every year have been 62 p.c and 38 p.c.
All through 2024, video games like Helldivers 2, Marvel Rivals, and Balatro noticed giant participant numbers or gross sales (or each). Nevertheless, Steam’s most-played titles are at the moment led by older, free-to-play titles: 2023’s Counter-Strike 2, 2013’s Dota 2, and 2017’s PUBG.
Behind these are Marvel Rivals and Path of Exile II, which each launched earlier this month. Sky’s Banana is the third recreation of the 12 months to spherical out Steam’s Prime 10 most-played, and it was additionally launched this previous December.
As PCGamer notes, Steam additionally homes 201,695 video games. In keeping with SteamDB, this 12 months had 18,687 releases, up 30 p.c from 2023’s 14,313 video games.
