There's no real way to accurately separate out or re-add these numbers into the gameplay data. In the case of a game like Dota 2, time spent spectating other matches is also showed as "gameplay," which can be considered a skew in the data as well.Īgain, we're at the mercy of Steam's reporting here.
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Players that are using Steam in offline mode don't seem to be counted in the service's aggregate statistics, and those that leave a game window open and idle for hours or days can inflate numbers substantially (though stats like "median hours played" are more resistant to these problems). What about offline gameplay and time spent idling on menus?īoth of these are also potential issues with the accuracy of Steam's "hours played" reporting. If you really think there's a problem with their numbers, we encourage you to take it up with them.
In any case, we're at the mercy of Valve's reporting here. I will say that, in my personal experience, the hourly reporting from Steam seems to match up with real world gameplay time in most, if not all, cases.
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It's hard to tell exactly how widespread or impactful this problem is, unless there's someone out there with a treasure trove of independent verification for exactly how many hours they've put into their games separate from Steam's reporting.Ībsent that, there's not much we can do to account for these kinds of reported discrepancies. Most say the site failed to register sometimes huge chunks of gameplay, while some say the site is actually showing more hours than they've actually spent with the game. Since launching our piece last night, we've received a lot of anecdotal reports from people saying the gameplay hour numbers listed for their games on are inaccurate. Steam doesn't measure my gameplay hours correctly, even since 2009. It's a pretty robust data set to study even if it isn't perfect. That time span covers the entire release history of over two-thirds of the games ever released on Steam. The most played games are still the games that have seen the most play in the last five years, which is all we have information about. While this is an important limitation in the data, it doesn't completely change the general conclusions we've reached so far. This is probably closer to the true number across all Steam games, though it's hard to say how the actual play data looks for the 800 or so Steam games released before gameplay tracking was activated. the ones we have a "complete" gameplay picture of) shows that only 26.1 percent of registered copies are sitting unplayed, as you can see above, rather than the 36.9 percent cited in the original article.
Restricting these charts to games with a release date after March of 2009 (i.e. The biggest change in the actual data comes in the aggregated distribution of hours played. I've noted this in the original piece and updated a number of charts to reflect this. For some of the other charts, it simply means that games from the pre-2009 period can't be compared completely accurately to those released after March of 2009. To be clear, this issue should not affect the "ownership" data in the original piece-games bought at any time appear in the scraped Steam data correctly. This helps explain why older games like Ricochet and Deathmatch Classic seem so unpopular among people who own them-because most players probably put in their hours before March of 2009. This isn't a small oversight: games played solely before this date would show up erroneously as "unplayed" in our data, and games released before that time might show fewer total hours than they should. Before posting our analysis last night, I was not aware that Steam only started tracking the "number of hours played" statistics on in March of 2009. Isn't your data off? Steam didn't always track gameplay hours in the past Here are some responses to the most common issues that have been brought up in the last 24 hours or so. We've also received some questions and concerns about our data, our methodology, and what we plan to do with this project going forward. It's been come from all over-comment threads, Twitter, e-mail, and links from other sites. Since we finally unveiled our Steam Gauge project late last night, we've been overwhelmed by positive responses to the data. Steam Spy gives daily, public estimates of Steam sales data.Steam Gauge: Measuring the value of the Steam Summer Sale.Steam Gauge: What VR games are popular with HTC Vive’s early adopters.
Steam Spy announces it’s shutting down, blames Valve’s new privacy settings.Valve working on “more accurate” replacement for Steam Spy’s sales data.
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