That Was The (Steam) Year, That Was

Hah! I needed something quick and easy for a post today and look - here comes the Steam Replay, riding to the rescue. I wonder how accurate a reflection of my gaming year it's going to be?

MassivelyOP has a piece up about how it's not likely to be all that relevant if you mostly play MMORPGs, which obviously is all they 're really interested in over there, much though they try to spread the net wider, MMORPG obsessives being perhaps a little thin on the ground to support an entire business model, these days. Oh, yeah, they have an article about that, too.

And it's true most longtime MMO players probably log in to their games of choice via dedicated launchers. That's the way it always used to be done and most successful MMORPGs are old, just like the people who play them. (I should, perhaps, make it clear that my personal definition of an "old" person is - and always has been, at least since I turned 27 - "anyone over thirty". I'll call it "middle-aged" if you prefer, but admitting to being middle-aged is just a way of saying you know you're old but you don't want to admit it...)

Ahem. Dragging myself back to the point, unless you play an MMORPG released in the last few years, New World say, or Lost Ark, chances are you don't play it on Steam. You could, probably, because every developer wants to be on Steam, which is why a lot of time and effort gets directed towards preparing all kinds of older MMOs to meet the requirements of Valve's platform. 

Guild Wars 2, for example, added a Steam client while i was still playing. I could have swapped across but I'd have had to start over from scratch, even though everyone ends up on the same servers. Obviously I didn't do that. Ditto for EverQuest II. And, for that matter, EverQuest. And LotRO. 

Or just about any other MMO you can think of. They're all on Steam but very few seem to allow you to move seamlessly over without requiring some sort of restart. That's why most people stay put, I imagine. MMORPGs are time-sinks. Who wants to lose years of progress? 

So much for the legacy market. For new MMORGs it's a very different story. When I hear about a new game I'd like to try, almost the first thing I check is whether it's on Steam. I'm significantly more likely to take a look at it if it is. That was a deciding factor for me this year when I gave Blue Protocol a go. 

Anyone notice I left BP:SR out of yesterday's round-up? Entirely unintentional. I just forgot about it until about ten seconds after I hit Publish. Not sure if that's a reflection on the game or not.

Surprising, really. That I didn't think of it. It's the most recent of the new games I played in 2025. I was at it all through the Autumn until I suddenly stopped, for no reason I can think of. 

The Steam Replay is quite useful for checking my memory. Seeing whether offhand assertions like I was making yesterday stand up to close examination. In this case, it seems they do and they don't. 

For example, I said I recently went back to Once Human but it didn't stick. What I hadn't remembered was that I kept doing that all year. Look at it. In, out, in, out...

In fact, the most recent attempt was one of the least successful. I played quite a bit of Once Human back in the spring and summer, apparently. I have no memory of that whatsoever.

Conversely, I remember my time with the next game very well indeed. It's not an MMO like the last two. It's a single-player game. Replay tells me I only played it for one month.

That's because I finished it. 

Finishing? It's a thing you can do with single-player games. MMO players may not have heard of it. 

Well, I say I finished Cloudpunk. What I did was complete the storyline and get a Game Over screen. There was more I could have done after that. I remember claiming in a post that I was going to go back and tidy up some loose ends but as the empty months show, I never did. 

Will I? Not likely. I rarely return to games to complete anything that wasn't covered by the main plot. Or to play them through for a second or third time just to see the alternate endings. 

I do sometimes go back years later and replay a game as if it was new, which it might as well be, since I won't remember anything about it. But all that fiddling around with different outcomes does nothing for me. The ending you get should be all the ending there is. Anything else is a fever-dream.

Also, to be completely accurate, I started Cloudpunk in December 2024, although not until after Christmas. I bought it in the Winter Sale. 

That's another cheap post waiting to be written: "What I bought in this year's sale". Can't write it yet because I haven't bought anything so far. I will, though. I know for a fact that I'll be getting a Steam Card in my Christmas Stocking and I already have some possibles and probables marked out.

That's one thing Steam Replay can't tell me - how many cheap blog posts it's provided across the year. It's a lot. Not least, all those Next Fest demos.

Two dozen demos equates to eight in each of the three Next Fests. I don't think it was quite as tidy as that but it would have been close. Also, as you can see from the chart, the timings don't quite match up. 

What's going on there? Did I miss the June event completely? Or did I somehow eke it out across the whole summer? 

Nope. I played six demos in June. I guess that means the chart above is telling me the percentage June represents of my whole year's play, then?

That's my problem with these things. I'm not someone who can glance at a chart or a graph and instantly take in all the implications. Or, rather, I am but whatever it is I think I've understood is quite likely to be wrong.

I'm not innumerate. I can interpret this stuff if I make the effort. But I do have to make that effort. It doesn't come naturally. Which means these annual wrap-ups are probably less thrilling for me than they are to a lot of people. Making sense of them can feel a bit like doing homework.

And as for this kind of thing >>>

Does anyone know what these spider-web graphics mean? Is that meant to suggest the Survival games I played were equal parts gory and story? 

Seriously, I have no idea. We never did these at school. Maybe they hadn't been invented then. They are certainly not intuitive. I guess I could go look it up but I'd have to be more curious than I am to do that. 

I'm a lot more interested in the comparisons Replay makes between my stats and everyone else's. I'm sure they're accurate but they're hard to believe all the same. 

I've been saying all year that I've been playing fewer games and spending less time doing it than I have for decades. Replay bears that out:

All the numbers are down on last year. Fewer games played on fewer days, possibly with less engagement, if you equate Achievements with that. Perhaps the most worrying statistic of all is that I only played for new games all year. Obviously Steam isn't counting demos there.

In that, I seem to be following the trend. It's what I keep hearing from many sources. People in general are tending towards old favorites rather than trying anything new. No wonder the games industry is in trouble.

Even more worrying is this:

Look at that. All the numbers that went down are going up. I don't think of myself as much of a gamer and I did less of everything and it was still more than most people. A lot more. 

I guess most people who have Steam installed either don't use it much or only log in to play a handful of favorites. I wonder how many there are like Mrs Bhagpuss, who presumably still counts as an active user even though she hasn't logged into Steam for nearly four years? 

Although that might change soon. I thought she was about done with video games after a couple of decades of pretty intensive play but a week or two back she was visiting someone and they showed her Baldurs Gate 3. Now she's hinting she might like something similar - or BG3 itself - for her birthday. Those hooks never really come free, do they? 

Whatever I get her (I'm open to suggestions. I don't think her machine will even run BG3. We bought it in the expectation she was done with graphically demanding games.) chances are I'll get it on Steam. It's just so much more convenient, isn't it? 

If that does happen, it'll be interesting to see what her Replay looks like for 2026. I mean, I never really intended to make much use of the platform when I started and now look at me. Way above the norm!