If proof is required, I refer you to the image above. Three hundred and eighty-two sessions in just three games, all played through Steam. It's clearly now my gaming portal of choice and I find myself mildly resenting any game I play that doesn't feature natively there.
The session number is interesting. Apparently I played more sessions, in just those three games, than there are days in a year.
And that's just the base of the iceberg. According to Replay, all my engagement stats are up on 2023. I played six more games, beat my best '23 streak by six days and picked up a bunch more Achievements. Altogether, I played twenty other games on top of the Big Three and twenty-two demos on top of that again, plus a few playtests for giggles. Even if we assumed I only played all of them only once, which would be a significant under-estimate, it comes to well over four hundred sessions in less than a calendar year.
It gives a lie to the impression I'd formed of of my gaming habits in 2024, which I would have said had been in steep decline. If you consider that the Steam tally doesn't include two of the games I played most frequently this year, EverQuest II and Wuthering Waves, or anything I played through Amazon Prime Gaming, any argument that my interest and involvement with video games has waned in recent times becomes difficult to sustain.
I'm sure I have played less this year but any decline has to be considered in relative terms. I may not play video games as much as I used to but that's because I used to play a hell of a lot. By any reckoning, I still play more than most people. And thanks to Steam, now I can prove it.
The Achievement stat is misleading. The availabilty of Achievements is wildly inconsistent between games so it really depends much more on what someone plays rather than how many hours they put in or even whether they care about gaining Achievements at all.
I would usually claim I have no interest in Achievements and it's certainly true I have zero interest in them in their own right. I consider them meaningless at best, at worst verging on insulting, the trigger points needed to acquire them often appearing trivial, fatuous or downright stupid.
Steam Achievements, though, are very useful in gauging my progress against that of the general population of a given game, something that does interest me a little. They also offer considerable insight into the story behind the top-line Steam Chart numbers.
If, for example, there's an Achievement for an unavoidable step in progression, as there is in many games, it's very instructive to see how many people have hit it. If a half a million people have bought a game but a week later only seven percent have played it long enough to reach the end of the Tutorial, it tells you a lot about how successful that game has really been.
The other two stats - Games Played and Longest Streak - do say something specific both about my engagement with the hobby this year and also about my particular style of gaming. I don't think twenty-three sounds like a lot of games to play in twelve months and, as I said, I actually played a good few more than that. Apparently I'm wrong there. Replay tells me I'm way ahead of the norm.
Steam players seemingly manage to restrict themselves to an average of one game every three months. I don't believe I ever played that few games, not even fifteen years or twenty years ago, when supposedly all I played was MMORPGs. Even then I'd most likely have played a dozen different MMOs in a year and a few other genres once in a while, too.
As for the Streak, that makes it look as though other people generally take a day off from gaming at least once a week, whereas I can barely tear myself away from the screen for a whole month. Fair.
The stat on new vs old looks a lot more representative of my current state of mind. As must be obvious to anyone who's been reading this blog for a while, the older I get, the more I crave novelty. I used to be very content with playing mostly the same games month in, month out and writing about them too. Now I'm always on the look-out for something fresh both to play and write about.
If the numbers are to be believed, that is very far from being a common point of view. With all the talk we hear of FOMO, you'd think everyone would be playing new games all the time but it seems the huge majority of Steam customers are very happy to stick with their old favorites. I was, once. Not so much any more.
I feel this feeds directly into something I regard as a major problem with popular culture in general, a strong preference for the familiar. People are constantly berating producers of games, movies, music and all forms of entertainment for their lack of originality and for sticking to a formula but the sad fact is that as we age, we tend to stop liking new things and cleave to the familiar. Genuinely fresh takes are rarely commercially successful with any demographic but the young.
There's research to that effect concerning music but it almost certainly applies to other activities and interests just as much. It's what drives both the tedious nostalgia cycle and the relentless insistence that whatever decade you were in High School and College marked some kind of Golden Age for popular culture. It really ticks me off and I'm very happy my Steam stats suggest I'm still moving forward, culturally, not always looking back.
The final stat from this year's Replay I'm going to consider is the highly suspect spider graph that supposedly tells me what kind of games I played in 2024. I am not at all convinced by the accuracy of this one, not least because it doesn't explain its methodology.
Steam tends to festoon games with all kinds of descriptive tags relating to gameplay, subject matter, genre and so forth. I have never found those to be any kind of reliable guide to what the games are actually like so, presuming that's where this information is coming from, it's flawed from the start.
In this case, I think it's accurate to say a lot of my playing time has been spent in RPGs or MMORPGs but I'm very surprised to see Open World Survival/Craft apparently less strongly represented. How that squares with the statistic from the same report that 63% of my total Steam hours have been spent in two Open World Survival Crafting games alone (Nightingale and Once Human) I cannot fathom, except of course that both of those are also tagged "MMORPG" on Steam (And Once Human even is!)
Looking at "Western", I played only one game in that genre this year as far as I can recall, Hard West, and my total played time in it so far comes to just seventy minutes. Why does Western even merit a mention at all? As for "Top-Down Shooter", I'm not even sure I know what one of those is, let alone which demo I played would have qualified.
Other than that, the report gives me a whole lot of detailed information on which games I played in which months, something that's already all too clear from the posts I wrote about those games at the time. I don't think we need to rehash any of that again.
Looking to next year, I already have several games in my basket from the Steam Winter Sale although I haven't made any final decisions on what to buy. I try and restrict myself to games I'll actually play sooner rather than later (Let alone never.) so I had been wondering if it was worth buying any new games at all, given my supposed waning interest. Having read my stats I guess I should stock up while they're going cheap.
Apparently I am still a gamer, after all.
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