Full Steam Behind: 2022 In The Rear-View Mirror

Everyone seems to be sharing their Steam Replay year-in-review stats so I thought I might as well get in on the act. It's an easy post so why not?

Except I don't seem to have received my annual report. I know Steam knows where I am. I've been getting emails about the sale, reminding me of all the titles on my Wishlist that are going cheap (Although not cheap enough that I've actually bought any.) but of the Replay itself there's been no sign.

Of course, my Steam account is linked to an email address I don't look at very often. But then I shouldn't need to; I have it set to forward everything to one I use every day. And it's working. That's how I'm getting the sales promos. So where's the Replay?

In my Spam folder, where else? Why did it go there? Search me.

To find out what was going on, I logged into the Gmail account I use for Steam. There was my Replay email, sitting at the top of the inbox, right beside all those sales pitches. 

If Gmail was perfectly happy to consider those legit, why, then, with the same software forwarding the same emails to another Gmail account, did the sorting algorithm decide to label one of them as spam? I mean, who did it imagine was sending the damn thing? It's literally Gmail mailing Gmail. Who's the spammer now?

Sometimes I think the real surprise is that any of this stuff works at all. We take it all for granted but as Twitter's recent troubles remind us, the whole internet is really all held together with string and spit.

Anyway, I got the report in the end, along with a couple more things from Square Enix and Flyff that I'd have liked to have seen when they were fresh but which had somehow been forwarded into the spam folder. I suppose the takeaway from all of this is that I should check my spam folder once in a while. Yeah, like that's going to happen...

Looking at the data itself, rather than the delivery method, it feels equally sketchy. There are a number of broken links and blank panels. It seems that during my "longest streak" (A vague concept that might refer to consecutive daily logins but that's a guess) I played seven games, only Steam can't remember what three of them were. Neither can I, although I imagine they were demos from one of the NextFests that have since been removed from the platform.

I was a little surprised at how little I appear to have used Steam in 2022. I would have imagined I'd at least have opened the interface most days although I would frequently just have been using it to look things up or find screenshots I've taken. I use Steam as a source of information as much as a gaming platform. Probably more. 

It makes a bit of a nonsense of the Replay stats as far as I'm concerned. I'd be more interested to know how many times I logged in and what I did while I was there, not just what games I played but I don't imagine facilitating bloggers in the pursuance of their craft is one of Valve's top priorities.

The breakdown of games played by age is interesting, if more than a little misleading. I'm pretty sure the heavy bias towards new releases is another by-product of my regular attendance at Steam's frequent NextFests. 

I really like demos. In many - quite possibly most - cases a thirty-to-sixty minute demo is about as much of a game as I'm likely to need or want. There's evidence to support that thesis in the form of all the games on my wishlist that found their way there on the back of demos and now linger fretfully, awaiting a purchase that will almost certainly never come. 

As I've already mentioned, even hefty discounts are rarely enough to tempt me to hit "Buy". When I do occasionally succumb, as the statistics prove, the results aren't pretty.

Exhibit A: My Time At Sandrock. I bought this as soon as it flagged up as available in an Early Access build. Since then, I've played it nine times, most of those in the first month. 

Although there were plenty of complaints about the inevitably buggy and incomplete nature of the game in Early Access, none of that had anything to do with my fast-fading interest. It played perfectly acceptably for me - I just found it a bit dull. I haven't really thought much about it since last May.

A similarly unsuccessful purchase, Sable, didn't even make it into the highlights.  Hardly surprising when a click-through reveals I've notched up just two sessions there. It represents a rounding error in terms of playtime at <1%. 

By far my most played titles on Steam, at least in terms of hours logged, were mmorpgs. Three of them account for well over half of all the time I spent "playing " games on Steam in 2022.

I am quite surprised to see New World accounting for sixty sessions. I knew I'd played a fair bit in the autumn, when the big update dropped, but I'd forgotten I also played for a good while in the spring. 40% of my time spent in Aeternum this year came in March, April and May.

Immediately before that I'd been heavily into Lost Ark, apparently. 80% of my time there was crammed into one month, February, with the remaining twenty per cent trailing along in March. We were all playing Lost Ark back then, of course. Is anyone still?

The spider-web graphic purporting to show where I spent most of my time this year is misleading. Not that it's any fault of Steam. It can only tally the games I play through its services, after all.

In a wider context, I certainly played  more Point & Click Adventure Games than anything other than mmorpgs this year but I played almost all of them on Prime Gaming. Maybe Amazon would like to send me a similar breakdown. Or not.

I'm not sure what Steam is counting as a "Life Sim". I wasn't aware I'd played any. Maybe My Time At Sandrock counts? As for "Building", the only game where I did much of that was Chimeraland. I did log into Valheim five times but all the building I did there was in 2021. Still, I suppose it just counts tags, not actual in-game activity. I mean, how would it know? Don't answer that.

Finally, there are the comparisons with other Steam users. As everyone else has noticed, most Steam users barely seem to trouble the statisticians at all. The average Steamer (Is that what we're calling ourselves?) plays just five games in a calendar year and barely manages to log in for much more than a week at a stretch.

I doubled the average for streaks and tripled it for both games played and achievements... erm, achieved. I think that definitely says more about the general level of engagement with the platform or, I should say, lack of it, than any particular enthusiasm on my side. 

It took me a long time to come around to Steam but I do now think of it generally as a Good Thing. Even so, it's a long way from being my primary interface with the games I play, the majority of which I fire up from their own proprietary launchers. 

Many of those I could play via Steam. I just choose not to. It's one extra layer of beaurocracy to climb over before I get to play the games themselves. The stats are nice, though. I'll give them that.