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!

Name In The Title? Numbers Go Up. (Not A Post About Blue Protocol: Star Resonance, Although There Are Some Screenshots.)

A while back, I mentioned that it looked as though Google and/or Blogger had changed something about the way they record page views. That's remained consistent ever since (Okay, it's only been a few weeks...) and it's given me a much better idea of which posts get noticed and why.

Surprise, surprise - it has a lot to do with two things: the topic of the post and whether you can tell from the title what it's about. Who'd have believed it, eh?

Over the many years I've been doing this, I've gone through a number of phases regarding how I come up with titles. Back at the very beginning I used short, often familiar, phrases I thought were a clever or witty match for the content, like "I Can See Your House From Here" for a post about flying mounts or "Again! Again!" for one about repetition in MMORPGs.

I kept that up for a good while but very quickly I also started adding the name of the game I was talking about, as in "Home Is Where The Art Is: EQ2" (Also, note how I used to call the game "EQ2" not "EQII", as I do now. The Label is still EQ2 because of that.) I carried on doing it that way for many years but as time went on I diversified. There were more and more posts with no named game in the title and it became increasingly hard to know what the topic was until you started reading (And often not even then...)

I'd always used pop culture references in my titles, particularly song titles or snatches of lyrics, but by the late twenty-teens that trend had pretty much taken over. Probably as a result of having a lot of time off work, what with my chemo and then the pandemic, meaning I had a lot of time to fill, I started using song lyrics almost exclusively and the more obscure the better. I used to spend almost as long scouring lyric.com for suitable phrases as I did writing the posts.

When that phase was at its height it was often next to impossible to figure out from the title alone what a post was going to be about. When I look back through the blog for something I know I posted about during that period, I have to use the Search function to find it because I no longer have any idea what most of the titles are supposed to mean. For example, a post called "A Dead Squirrel That I Hit" turns out to be about Divinity: Original Sin 2 and another going by the name of "I'm In A Film Of Personal Soundtrack" gives my thoughts on music in video games.

Throughout this phase I still sometimes appended the name of a game to the title but if I found a quote or lyric fragment I really liked I'd generally let it stand on its own for aesthetic reasons. It was fun for quite a while (For me, that is. Possibly not so much for anyone trying to figure out what the hell I was writing on any given day.) but eventually finding suitable lyrics turned into a bit of a chore so I stopped.

That was followed by a short period when I tried to make the titles as declarative as possible, sometimes to a parodic extent, as in, for example... well, it didn't last long, I can't remember anything specific and I haven't been able to find anything by random browsing but it was a thing for a bit, just take my word for it.

After that, in the most recent phase before the present-day, I've tended just to use whatever seemed like a good idea at the time. A bit of all the above and a lot of whatever took my fancy on the day. 

And none of it seemed to matter all that much because I couldn't really tell who was reading what or even how many readers there were. 

I did once think I knew. Long, long ago I used to follow the stats religiously and they were pretty consistent. We're talking a decade or so back there. I used to be able to track a steadily-rising graph that seemed to indicate a growing readership and it kind of made sense.

After a few years, though, all the lines started to head for the stars. I know i posted about it once or twice, when the phenomenon was new and briefly exciting - tens of thousands of views per post! It became apparent soon enough that almost none of those views was real, though, and it was far too much trouble to try and dig any convincing numbers out of the slurry of false positives, so I just gave up looking at the stats at all.

For quite a few years I looked Blogger's own stats maybe two or three times a year at most. I stopped using Google Analytics years before they shut it down and I didn't sign up to the replacement. About the only time I really checked the numbers was after Blaugust, just to see if it made any impact. It didn't seem to.

And then came the recent shift in how the data is gathered, still unexplained but now very much the New Way of doing things. And it's much better.

It's also much worse in that I'm seeing hugely reduced visitor numbers but it seems far more likely they represent some close approximation of reality, not least because the statistics now correlate convincingly with the topics of the posts and especially with the titles. 

As soon as I saw what was happening, I re-instated my former policy of including the names of games in the header, whenever appropriate. When not writing about games, I've tried to make the titles at least marginally relevant to the content. 

I'm not a zealot about it. If a post is itself somewhat fuzzy or unfocused then I'm happy to have the title reflect that. I also still go with something that amuses me or that I think looks smart, on the occasions anything like that comes to mind.

And it seems to have some effect. Regular posts with no named game in the title all end up with roughly the same viewership numbers after a week or two, suggesting a fairly consistent readership. Interestingly, it runs at around a third of my subscriber numbers as reported by Feedly, which could either mean two-thirds of my supposed followers have forgotten I exist or that all of them can only stomach about a third of what I'm offering them. 

Or anything in-between, I guess. I imagine it's a bit of a mixture. I'm just happy anyone comes back at all.

Certainly most people leave no trace. I get plenty of comments, for which I'm perpetually and eternally grateful because comments are the life-blood of a blog, but I don't get that many commenters. It's mostly the same names, many of whom are bloggers themselves, on whose blogs I also leave comments. It's all very cosy and a big part of why I keep doing this but it doesn't tell me a great deal about who else is reading this stuff.

One thing that's very noticeable, now I can see the trends so clearly, is that increased page views do not lead to more comments. Since the new accounting took over, it's very plain that posts about specific games get about twice the page views and posts about hot new titles that have just launched or otherwise entered the news cycle get anything up to four times the base figure. 

And yet all of them still have the same kind of comment numbers. Only once in a very rare while do I get a comment from someone I've not heard from before or even an anonymous comment. More people are finding the clearly-labeled posts about topical content, sure, but whether they're finding anything they like when they get there is as mysterious as ever.

The question I've been asking myself is, now I have this semi-reliable method of assessing the success of what I'm posting, what, if anything, am I going to do with it? The answer is almost certainly going to be "Not much."

In the last month, my most-viewed posts, by a good margin, have been those on Blue Protocol: Star Resonance. As it happens, I'm still playing that game and I do have more to say about it so there will be some more of that. It will be instructive to see if those gain the same traction or if  BP:SR's shine has already faded. At least I have some kind of benchmark to judge against now.

I won't, obviously, be writing about games (Or anything else.) that I'm not interested in just because it gets attention but I will be making sure to mention the names of games I do write about in the titles. In general, I plan on maintaining a level of clarity in the titles that would have been anathema to me a few years ago, when I was actively attempting to make them as incomprehensible as possible.

Of course, I may just get bored of that and move into some as-yet unthought of new phase. Stats are all very well but you can't let them get in the way of self-indulgence creativity.

If anyone was hoping this post was going somewhere, I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint you. This is about as far as it's going to go. I got so bored writing it a few paragraphs back I was going to give up on it altogether but then I realized that would mean I'd have to start over on something else, either that or miss a posting day, so carrying on seemed like the easier option, but I can't say I'm thrilled about it. Congratulations to anyone that's made it this far! 

Before I finish, does anyone remember that thing Darkpaw were doing with the new Creator Program for EQII? I wrote something about it. I wasn't very complimentary. 

Well, it's happened. They flagged it up on the Launcher recently. I'm not sure when but I only noticed it last night. The forum post about it went up on Saturday. Eleven Creators have been inducted in the first tranche, including Fading, who runs The EverQuest Show, and our very own Stargrace.(Who seems to be operating from a new blog I didn't have in my Feedly or Blogroll. I do now!) None of the others have I heard of before. 

Good luck to all of them. The only thing I have to contribute is that, now I can see some stats I believe to be relatively reliable, I can confirm that clearly-labeled posts about EQII tend to get double the baseline views, so perhaps there is some kind of audience for the game outside the forums after all. 

I can't say I believed it until now. 

Page Counts, Clicks, X-Cetra

Who's up for some blogging about blogging? Yes, I know it's not Blaugust any more but always remember, a blog is not just for August.

It all started when I replied to Tipa's comment on Wednesday's post. Not the one about Wednesday the show. The one I put up two days ago. The one that none of you have read. 

Oh, you did read it, did you? Congratulations! That puts you in quite the elite club. Want to know how to get into the club's super-secret, cool kids only treehouse? Click on the embedded video in that post. If you're quick you could be the fifth person ever to see it!

I expect people not to watch the videos. Hardly anyone ever does. I can see how many times they've been viewed on YouTube (And yes, I checked, and watching it on the blog does increment the YouTube counter.). The last one I did before this, for the post Some Puppy Walking,  has been watched sixteen times. The post itself has over three hundred views so you do the math...

Three hundred views used to be bang on average for a post here, after it's been up for a week or more. So far, only forty-five people have viewed Wednesday's post, according to the little widget next to it in the post list in Blogger. 

That's about the only stat I ever pay any attention to these days. I got very fed up with the unnecessary complexity of Google Analytics, so when they revamped it and you had to jump through a load of technical hoops to have your website included in the new version, I opted not to bother.

I also stopped looking at Blogger's own stats ages ago because they don't seem to filter out bots so they're always ludicrously inflated. Even the page-view number that I do still look at, mostly because it's always right there in front of me, is just the same number from the main stats, so I don't take it too seriously either.

Still, even bad stats are useful if they're consistent in their badness. Any sudden change means something must have happened. And there has been one heck of a big change just recently.

Before Blaugust, that page view figure bobbled fairly consistently somewhere between 250 and 400 over the first seven days or so after the post published. Most posts stop picking up views after that although there can obviously be spikes at any time.

At this point, you're probably expecting me to say page views went up during Blaugust. That's always been the conventional wisdom and with this year having a record number of participants and with me consistently linking every post in the Blaugust Discord, it's more than reasonable to imagine it would hold true. 

It didn't, though, or not for me. Most years I see little or no uptick in views from Blaugust and this year was much the same. Until the last week, that is. 

From the 25th of August, page views almost doubled, averaging around seven or eight hundred. That bump carried on long after Blaugust ended and indeed became more pronounced as September went on, with quite a few posts hitting four figures, topping out at just over two thousand.

Why? No idea. I rarely have any clue why these things happen. And equally, I have no explanation for why they stop, which seems to be what's happened now. Only this time the drop is as spectacular as the rise was.

Generally, any post I put up gets most of its views in the first 24-48 hours, as you'd expect. I haven't been keeping track but I'm fairly sure back when they were finishing up with  three or four hundred views, they'd have seen half of those in the first two or three days.

The last two posts have so far managed 45 views in two days and 34 in 24 hours respectively. That doesn't seem normal to me, which is why this morning I started fiddling about in Google's stat cupboards to see if I could figure out what was going on.

I'll put you out of your suspense now. I did not figure out what was going on. I have no way of knowing whether regular readers have suddenly found better things to do or if Google has started tallying things differently. I'll just wait for it to change again, which it will.

I did, however, discover some other new and quite interesting things while I was rummaging and that's how this post came about.

Firstly, I'll say that Google Search Console is a huge improvement on Analytics for the casual user. If you have a Blogger blog, I'd recommend giving it a look. It's much clearer, far easier to understand, and best of all it explains what the stats mean. You can set filters and use them to dig out some quite useful detail without a great deal of trouble.

I particularly liked the new Insights Report, which gives you a very clear indication of which of your posts are trending up or down and enough granularity to take a shot at figuring out why. And that's where I noticed something very odd.

It wasn't that there'd been a big spike in search requests for my post on housing in Throne and Liberty, which I put up just under a year ago. T&L has just added housing so obviously people are googling for information on it, none of which they're going to find here.

It's harder to explain why there's been a surge of interest in Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt. If anything new is happening there, I've missed it. Two of my posts about it do turn up on the first page of Google Search results though, so I guess if anyone is still interested, they might well give me a look.

The one that really set me thinking, though, was the sudden interest in this post from just over a year ago. 

That's a "What I've Been Listening To Lately" post. No-one reads those. Okay, some people do, but clearly that series isn't going to come up in a general search very often. Yes, they do often have the names of famous people in the body of the post but hardly ever in the title and let's be realistic here - even putting Taylor Swift's name in the title of your blog post is not going to get you onto the first hundred pages on a search result, is it? I mean, there's a lot of competition there...

In the case of this particular post, I didn't mention Taylor Swift in the title (Although A$AP Rocky's Taylor Swif is one the featured tunes.) or anyone even close to being that famous. I did, as it happens, mention the name of a Woody Allen movie that doesn't even feature in the post at all, but that's not what people were searching for.

They were looking for a band called X-Cetra, a bunch of Californian tweenage girls who made a very odd album by the name of Stardust a couple of decades ago. I said in the post that X-Cetra didn't even have a Wikipedia page. I just checked and they still don't. I guess that explains why someone would bother to click through to a blog that mentioned them.

And they have. Not in the kind of numbers that click through to check on posts about clothes or housing in Once Human, which seem to be by far the biggest draw here over the last twelve months, but in numbers that feel statistically significant, especially since most of them appear to have happened not when I put the post up last year but in this last month.

 

In fact, my top search query for September is "X-cetra stardust" and two more variations of the phrase are also in the top ten. Altogether, there were 829 searches for X-Cetra Stardust in the last 28 days and twenty-nine people clicked through to look at the page in full. It may not sound like a great conversion rate but in comparison, of more than a thousand inquiries about housing in Throne & Liberty, only nine people clicked.

What's even more interesting is that, of the 39 clicks from search the post has ever received, 38 of them were in the last month. There was a huge spike (Seven clicks!) on 3 September and it's been ticking away ever since.

If there's been any general news about the album or the band, I'm not aware of it. Google Trends does confirm a huge spike of interest on 3 September but a general search finds nothing special.

Enter Blaugustian Calishat with their invaluable selection of search refinement tools. With the inestimable Back That Ask Up utility I was able to narrow my search down to the exact moment of the spike and find the reason for it - an article in Rolling Stone entitled "Four Best Friends Made an Album as Kids. 25 Years Later, It’s a Cult Classic"

It's a big article with lots of new information. It even links to a "Blogspot User", sadly not me. I bet they got some page views that day. I just got the spill-over. 

But wait. There's more. 

Unsurprisingly, given the paucity of information on the band, my post does appear on the first page of Google search results, but you have to scroll down a fair way. The thing that amazed me and led to this post, though, is what I saw at the top of the page. 

It's in the image up there at the head of this post. That's a screenshot of the top of a Google search page, the bit I rarely look at. I almost always scroll straight past all of the featured links and the AI summaries to the point where the old school listings start and go from there.

In the middle, with the eye-catching thumbnail of Teri Gender Bender from Le Butcherettes, is a link to my post. Why I'm getting that prime spot rather than, say, the Rolling Stone article, I have no idea but I'll happily take it. 

That big panel across the top of the results seems only to appear if you search for specific entity by name. It works for bands, albums, movies, actors, games... As soon as you add any detail to the query, though, it vanishes. Has it always been there? I guess I hardly ever search for anything purely by name so I would very rarely see it. 

I might have to  pay it more attention, now I discover that one of my posts has been featured that way. I guess it proves you don't have to pay to get featured on Google search, at least.

And after all that, I guess my extremely late for Blaugust advice on how to get more page views and clicks would have to be write about very obscure things no-one else is covering or clothes and housing in online games. That's what seems to be working for me, anyway.

For a given value of "working", that is. A very, very tiny one.

The Numbers Don't Lie

It began with denial that turned into resistance only when the truth could no longer be ignored. Next came grudging acceptance and finally complete capitulation. I have been assimilated. I am no longer an individual. I am now part of the hive mind.

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.

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.

Gallic Shrug

This morning Tobold posted something about his Steam library and how many unplayed games there are in it. It's one of those blogging perennials that come up now and then, here and there, predictable and ineradicable as weeds.

Time was when I could indulge myself with a smug, hipsterish drive-by, something along the lines of "Not a problem I recognize. I don't even use Steam". Yeah, those days are long gone. I've had to find other ways to annoy people. 

I'm not sure when I got myself a Steam account or when I started using it regularly, although I do know the latter came a good while after the former. I use it most days now. I've succumbed, slowly, at first reluctantly then later with some small enthusiasm, to its much-vaunted convenience. 

I'd still generally prefer to have games in standalone launchers on my desktop. It seems quicker and easier to me. Since Steam lets me launch individual games from my library from their desktop shortcuts, though, that's something of a moot point.

I only asked for the bill!

 

What is undoubtedly easier is buying games through Steam. It saves having to make new accounts, fill out new forms and come up with new user IDs and passwords. For that reason alone, if there's a straight choice between buying a game direct and buying it via Steam I tend to go through Valve's portal.

For all that, I don't yet think of myself as a Steam person. And neither does Steam. That was made objectively clear to me this morning when I tried to use the Steam Calculator Tobold linked to find out what my Steam stats might be. 

The calculator offers more than a dozen ways you can identify yourself, none of which meant anything to me. Never mind all that: "Just sign in via Steam and we'll do it for you." Yeah, no you won't. Apparently having a valid, recognized, working account isn't enough. You have to have a Profile too. 

I don't have one and I wasn't planning on getting one. I suppose I could have filled out the necessary paperwork but since avoiding paperwork is the primary reason I use Steam in the first place that didn't really appeal. Instead, I thought I'd do it the old-fashioned way. Just look at my Library and count the games.

Damp dufflecoats, patchouli and despair?

I can see why Tobold didn't do that. He has 445 of them. I have a nice, round fifty. I can almost see them all without scrolling down. 

Of those fifty there are just two that I've never played at all: Mixed Messages and Age of Wonders III. They were both free. The first I got because at one time a lot of people were blogging about it and I thought I might too but I never got around to it. The second looked like the kind of game people often blog about so... you get the picture.

Of the remaining forty-eight, I have finished twenty. I know! Surprised me, too. Although some of them are very short. 

Fourteen more are mmorpgs, meaning they can't be finished. I'm still playing all of those, at least for some value of "playing". I'm never not playing any mmorpg I have ever played unless it's actually closed down. Just not playing it at the moment. 

We're in France. It's not like it doesn't happen.

Come to think of it I think three of those mmos (Stash, Dragon Nest Europe and Bless Online) have closed down. I should probably uninstall those.

That leaves fourteen. Five of those I am still planning on finishing some day (Yonder, Tanzia, Divinity: Original Sin 2, Kingdoms of Amalur, My Time At Portia), one is Valheim, of which no more need be said, and one is Broken Sword 5, about which this post was originally meant to be and still will be when I get there.

The residue are demos plus one game I tried and instantly disliked but never got around to uninstalling. That one's called What Never Was, appropriately.

How much the whole lot might be worth I can't say, neither what I paid for them, nor the market value, high or low. I can say that of fifty titles I paid some amount of money for eighteen of them. Two others (Rift and Project: Gorgon) I paid someone else money for then linked them to Steam. I'd be very surprised if I've paid more than a couple of hundred pounds for the lot although I did probably buy more than half of them in sales.

Trust me, I'm not a doctor.

Of all the unplayed (or underplayed) titles, Broken Sword 5 stands out. It was a birthday present that I asked for many years ago, suggesting I was, at least at the time, pretty keen on playing it. More to the point, it was the reason I signed up for a Steam account in the first place. You can't play it without one, even if you have the thing on DVD. Which I do.

Bearing that in mind, I thought maybe I should have another crack at it. The last time I tried I got stuck and since I didn't want to use a walkthrough I took a break hoping inspiration would strike. It didn't.

Not so much an achievement as an essential plot point.

Or at least that's how I remember it. I even remember roughly where and how I was stuck. Steam doesn't. When I went to log in and restore my most recent save there wasn't one. Instead I had the choice of starting a New Game at the Tutorial, at Chapter 1 or at Chapter 2. 

Hmm. Maybe I was at Chapter 2. Don't remember it that way but if I hadn't already finished Chapter 1, why would it even give me the option?

So I tried that and got a cut scene and a voiceover full of plot points that very definitely must have happened further on in the narrative than I ever reached. To avoid spoilers I quit out of that and tried Chapter 1 instead. It seemed... completely and utterly new. Not a single thing there that I recognized, other than George and Nico. 

Ah, but who cares? It was gorgeous to look at at and fun to play. The dialog was witty and amusing, the plot was intriguing, the puzzles were exactly the right difficulty so I kept going. It didn't seem to match anything about my memories of the previous times I'd played but what the hell. 

You can't beat a good joke about les évènements, that's what I always say.

I played for an hour and a half until I reached a convenient stopping point and then I stopped. I'd gotten a few achievements so I looked at those to see how many other people had managed them. 

It would appear a lot of people give up on the game right at the start because two of the achievements were for discoveries material to the plot and only sixty per cent of players have those. Pretty sure you can't get any further if you don't. Then again, maybe the rest just skip straight to Chapter 2 since apparently that's allowed.

Then I noticed I had another achievement. It was for completing the tutorial. I did that in October 2016. Maybe that's what I vaguely remember although since I also remember not being able to finish whatever it was I was doing that doesn't feel like it could be right.

Learned how, yes. Played the game, no.

Only just under thirty per cent of players get that achievement, suggesting most people skip the tutorial. Seems fair enough. By the time you get to the fifth game in a series you've probably figured out how to play.

We'll see how far I get this time. I do want to find out what happens although the mystery that really interest me isn't so much who stole the painting and why as what happened to my saves and the game I thought I was playing.

I imagine it'll all come clear in the end. Maybe I'll do the tutorial again and see if there are any clues there. I could probably use all the help I can get.

Gotta Get My Disco Shoes On

In my reply to a long and thoughtful comment Seanas left on my first impressions post, I observed that one of the things I found most surprising about Disco Elysium in early play was just how much of a "game" it was. In ludic entertainments predicated on narrative and atmosphere, I'm used to the mechanics taking a back seat to almost everything else. There can be a few quirky tricks to pick up at the start but with those down it's full ahead on plot, puzzles and storyline.

But then, Disco Elysium does claim to be an rpg. And not just any rpg. As the publisher's blurb on the Steam store has it, "the most faithful representation of desktop role playing ever attempted in video games". Yes, well, that may be so. I'm only eight hours in and anyway I wouldn't pretend to have played enough crpgs to make a judgment. Nor "desktop" for that matter.

What I have noticed is the way the game employs some very traditional rpg gameplay levers like levels and xp and stats. It feels odd, playing something that in many ways feels like a souped-up version of the Blackwell Chronicles, fed by the same ostensible purpose of solving murders and mysteries, yet at the same time seeing your character progress in much the same way they would in an mmorpg.

Once you have a player character with levels and stats that increase over time, operating in a world where the capabilities of the non-player characters don't change, the possibility of gaming the gameworld immediately presents itself. It's expected. The game itself prompts you to return to certain challenges you may have failed once you've levelled up and spent some skill points.

As Seanas points out, it's even possible to become stuck after failing a check and not be able to proceed until you've leveled up sufficiently to go back and beat it. Just like outlevelling a difficult boss you couldn't beat then coming back to kick his ass.

Since this isn't an mmorpg you have, again as Seanas mentions, you have the option of saving before you try something, then re-loading if you don't get the result you want. It's a common practice with many genres but also something I've stated on numerous occasions I don't like to do. I will do it, naturally, because better that than becoming frustrated and blocked, but saving at any other point than the end of a session significantly diminishes my involvement with a game.

So far, in eight hours of play, I have only had to re-load once and that was when I mis-clicked a conversation option. The way dialog interaction is presented in Disco Elysium leaves the player prone to this kind of error. Sometimes there are what seem like anything up to a dozen lines of text, closely spaced. The options already taken often remain on screen in a dulled shade of the default dialog text color, a reddish-orange which, set against a brownish-black backdrop, is already indistinct.

 

If you happen to have a tendency, as I do, towards occasional, involuntary muscle spasms, brought about by playing long gaming sessions with your mouse-hand unconsciously tensed, it's all too easy to find you've accidentally made your character say something other than what you intended. I'd guess it happens to me once or twice most sessions.

In this case I twitch-clicked the option that made my character ask the barkeeper for a drink. Since I'm planning on keeping him drink and drug free for the duration of the game, that was kind of a deal-breaker. I tried to get out of the interaction but even going to the Options menu didn't shift the conversation back to the previous stage. In the end I had to reload the last autosave, giving me about fifteen minutes of gameplay to repeat.

Even with that hazard in mind I still haven't begun saving before decision points. I can feel the game constricting around me and I may well become trapped but if it happens I'll have learned something important about the design. Better that than break my own fourth wall.

Another thing I haven't yet done is to read a walkthrough or even check if any exist. It's possible the extreme variability of the narrative structure might make traditional guides non-viable, I suppose, although I doubt it.

Eight hours gameplay without needing an out-of-game hint is unusual. It speaks well of the much-vaunted freedom of action although it also has a lot to do with the sheer volume of text there I've had to read. I'd like to avoid walkthroughs for as long as I can. I'm considerably more sanguine about taking advice from guides than I am about save-scumming but I'd still prefer to keep it to a minimum so I'm happy not to have needed to check Google just yet.

There are other, arguably more organic, means of manipulating the dice. (And Disco Elysium does in fact have dice. Each skill check is a roll of two D6 and it happens on screen. You can literally see what you rolled. I can't remember the last time I played a game where that happened. It's another design choice that emphasizes the undeniable truth: you're playing a game). One of them is the aforementioned use of skill points to tweak stats. The other is gear.

 

Disco Elysium uses a gear-based progression system. This is something that seemed so out of context it took me a couple of sessions even to notice. Every so often you get the opportunity to acquire clothing and items which your character can equip and those items have stats just like they would in World of Warcraft or EverQuest.

Okay, not exactly like that. Most of the ones I've seen have just one or two stats. They modify specific skills by a point or two, enough to be significant in the context of the game. They can also modify stats both ways, up and down but, unlike in most rpgs, in Disco Elysium there could be good reasons why you'd want to lower a stat instead of raising it. You can become too skilled for your own good, leading to obsessive behavior and social disadvantage. Or so I read in the tool tips. None of my skills are in any danger of back-firing just yet.

It took a while for it occur to me but the penny finally dropped as I was checking the list of skill checks I'd failed and which the game was prompting me to retry. Just as in EverQuest twenty years ago you might have taken your fire-resist gear out of the bank for a Naggy raid or swapped your sword for a charisma-boosting Stein of Moggok before trading with an impressionable NPC shopkeeper, so in Disco Elysium you might want to slip on your green snakeskin shoes for the boost they give to your Composure skill.

It's an extraordinarily artificial, gamelike concept to find embedded in an existential meditation like Disco Elysium but someone has made an heroic attempt to maintain at least some kind of tenuous link between the object and its supposed psychological or physical effects. Each item comes with a short description that's more than basic flavor text.

In the third decade of the twenty-first century we're long past the simple days of the nineteen-seventies and eighties, when the framework for what would become "roleplaying games" was being cobbled roughly together by intense young men in unfashionable clothing. (I'm guessing it was mostly men but I think I'm pretty safe on their fashion sense, either way).

Those were the days when what we've come to know as "stats" were genuine outcroppings of material properties (adamantium or mithril being understandably better-suited to provide protection from assault than cloth or linen) or sympathetic magic (the skin of an ogre or a giant, fashioned into gloves or a belt, affording the wearer the proportionate strength of the original owner, for example). 

Many rpgs, mmo or otherwise, still pay lip-service to these connections when it suits but a glance at the menu of statistics attached to almost any piece of armor in most of the games we play suggests the primary source for all of them is a spreadsheet. No-one pretends there's even a magical handwaving explanation for how your fancy hat improves your chance of landing a critical hit with a greatsword that looks like an ironing-board, let alone how your ornate leg-armor adds to your intelligence.

In Disco Elysium someone has done their damnedest to force these statistics into some kind of meaningful harness. Take those shoes I mentioned: wearing them adds to your Composure but detracts from your Savoir Faire and the game tells you just why that is. 

The "awesome watchtower heels" are what makes you more composed, something that actually makes sense when you read the in-game description of the Composure skill. It specifically states "You'll rock that disco outfit a lot more if you don't slouch". Crazy, perhaps, but undeniably consistent. Conversely, the skill description for Savoir Faire emphasizes athleticism and acrobatics. It seems entirely resonable that you'd be less light on your feet in a pair of winklepickers that pinch. 

It's a brave attempt at rationalizing the irrational but, because this is very much a game, the result is inevitable. You roam the city with your entire wardrobe stuffed into an invisible suitcase (as usual, no attempt has been made to explain how you carry all this stuff), blithely casting off your white satin shirt in the middle of the street (in a snowstorm, likely as not) to change into a stained muscle-vest because, apparently, wearing a dress shirt helps you Conceptualize postmodernist architecture, while wearing a tank top helps you punch people in the face.

The bizarre thing is you can see how that makes some kind of twisted sense. These items and their
statistically linked concepts have metaphorical connections that aren't hard to parse. The problem comes in the functionality. I strongly suspect that any imagined benefit to Savoir Faire that might be gained by removing a tight-fitting pair of shoes would pretty quickly dissipate when you found yourself standing in your socks in an ice-puddle.

All of which returns me to my original contention: that Disco Elysium is a very gamey game. The question is, does that add to its allure or tarnish it? And I'm not sure, not yet. I'm still struggling to wrap my perceptions around the concepts. It's taken me a surprisingly long time to realize what and where the controls are. Now I'm concentrating on figuring out how they work. Normally this is the sort of thing you'd get past in the tutorial but I'm hip-deep in plot. I wasn't expecting to have to work the the controls so dilligently just to solve the puzzles and enjoy the patter.

If nothing else, it's certainly made me think afresh about how rpgs work. There was a time when I did a lot of that but constant exposure has eroded my curiosity. I can at least thank Disco Elysium for that. Whether my awakened awareness is going to enhance or abrade my enjoyment of less ambitious entries in the canon remains to be seen.

One thing's for sure. I'll be giving the next person who complains about dodgy itemization in mmorpgs short shrift. Try balancing two dozen stats and coming up with a unique explanation for how they work, on every single item. Then again, according to the Steam store description there are only ninety-four equippable items in the entire game...

I'll get my coat. (It's a Disco Ass Blazer. +1 Esprit de Corps: halogen watermarks). Smooth!