The holiday season is here and alongside the ongoing Winter Sale, Steam has brought us another gift: Steam Replay 2024. Also known as Year In Review, this feature gives each and every user a detailed look at their year on the platform. It has been around for a few years now and is always an interesting read, especially when you compare your own stats to others.
One statistic featured in Steam Replay this year is the percentage of playtime for new, less new, and ‘classic’ games – displaying the numbers for all Steam users as well. And from that, we can see that brand-new games are the least popular of the lot.
Steam users are spending most of their time in older games
Looking at the stats for new releases, recent favorites, and classic games, we can see that nearly half of all playtime was spent in games released in the last 1-7 years. However, as we can see, games over 8 years old are still massively popular.
- New Releases (games released in 2024): 15%
- Recent Favorites (releases in the last 1-7 years): 47%
- Classic Games (releases from 8 or more years ago): 37%
You may notice this only adds up to 99%, so it looks like 1% has been lost in some kind of rounding.
As you can see from our own stats above, we basically didn’t play any games older than 8 years, but we’re an outlier considering we spend our time benchmarking the latest hardware on the latest games in our testing lab.
However, it is worth noting that we did spend 8% of total playtime in Counter-Strike 2 (one of our go-to benchmark games) which may not technically count as a game older than 8 years, but we feel it probably should considering it is essentially an updated version of CS:GO. The game’s release day is still listed as 2012 on the store page, so it seems likely our 0% stat is simply being rounded down.
In any case, speaking of Counter-Strike, it’s these kinds of games as a service (or live service) titles that help drive the majority of people’s playtime on Steam. Many users stick to what they know and what they have invested time and money into. Looking at the most played charts today, you’ll find older games such as Dota 2, PUBG, Grand Theft Auto V, Rust, and War Thunder still highly relevant.
The recent launch of games like Path of Exile 2 and Marvel Rivals will certainly help boost the ‘new releases’ playtime numbers, while other single-player experiences from this year such as Black Myth: Wukong and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will likely come and go once, though Wukong player numbers remain strong to this day.
