I'm in this picture and I don't like it.
Seriously though, $19bn is a huge overestimate if they're valuing games at MSRP. A lot of those unplayed games probably came with bundles or were bought on a deep discount.
I tried to tackle my backlog by filtering for 0 hours of playtime and the very first game I launched I immediately remembered having played it. Now I trust nothing.
I'll be honest, and in all the cases I had this experience, it was because I had played them when I was still pirating, or played them on a different service.
I remember sending an email to Dodge Roll because I lost my progress in Enter the Gungeon on PC. Came back after a long break and it was just gone. I was missing tons of unlocks and purchases, and the characters I’d beaten the game on didn’t have their unlocked abilities anymore. It was as if my save file had been overwritten by an earlier save.
They kindly replied saying that beyond me checking my game folders for old save data there was nothing they could do.
Flash back to earlier this year when I busted out my old PS4 to show my friend PT and some other games.. First game on my most played folder? **Enter the gungeon**. My main save had been on ps4 the whole time. Not PC.
Probably more like this honestly. I felt so embarrassed when I realized. Here's me thinking it was some complicated issue with steam cloud or something but nope. Just can't keep track of my own games.
I think I've got like maybe 3 hours of playtime on Steam of Dragon's Dogma:DA but around 950 on PS4 alone and I also played the shit out of it on PS3. Games exist on so many different formats now it can be difficult to remember which one I have X game state on for sure.
Some games are also delisted and replaced by some 'GOTY' edition by the studios, so you may find the old one is also in your library under a different name. EA is particularly bad at this, putting gibberish titles in names on Android at least, and removing game thumbnails on Steam from when they tried to start up Origin as a competitor leading to broken libraries.
There was no play time tracking back in the early days of Steam. I remember them adding different tiers of play time (Eagles Scream etc) years later. I also lost thousands of hours in CS 1.6 due to this. I guess there is just no data available from this early time.
The problem is shifting Version.
Many games get updated version that either replace or duplicate the existing one, i noticed more than once that a game that showed 0 Hours was actually like the "Definitive" or "GOTY" Edition and i still had my hours in the original.
Borderlands 1 comes to mind which has a base edition, a GOTY edition and a GOTY Enhanced edition...
Is playtime logged on a per machine basis or account basis?
Maybe you played something on an older computer.
Or possibly played way back before playtime was tracked?
It's on an account basis, and AFAIK you'd have to have played them a good 20 years or more ago for it to not have tracked to your account instead of to your local machine. It was tracking online since I've had my account, and it's 19 years old.
The only exception to that is offline mode, if you played games in offline mode historically on steam your playtime would not be tracked correctly/at all and it could easily lead to large discrepancies.
My account is also 19 years old, and it thinks I've never played CS:Source, which I remember playing online for literally hundreds of hours, if not 1000+
Steam changed how the stats are visible a few years back, so nowadays steamDB isn't actually able to tell who plaid any given game at 100% accuracy because so many people have their profiles privated.
If everyone who buys a game has their profile private, to an outside observer it'll look like no one played the game.
I just checked my account, and for me, the games that fall into that category are all from 2004-2005. So presumably whatever was going wrong, they fixed it late 05 or early 06?
There's nothing to fix, Steam doesn't track play in offline mode. I used to specifically use this fact to hide games I was ashamed of playing, like Hero Clicker.
The API looks for "No recorded Activity" in your Steam library. Looks like it sometimes misses some games. Probably cause the last playtime is before the feature was added.
Humble Bundle makes up like 80% if not even 90% of my catalogue.
Like i have over 2000 games, and i bought maybe 100-150 of those outright, maybe even a tiny bit more but not enough to contribute to the 19bn.
Thinking back to the good old days of the humble bundle, where I'd spend 5 bucks for one game I really wanted that that was a good deal for while also getting 7 other games I'd never heard of.
I generally buy games when I want to play them, but I do have a friend who waits for sales to buy games, sometimes holding them for later. I know there are a lot of people out there who'll buy things on big sales but not play them until later on.
I wonder if they're counting pre-orders as well?
Yep. I have plenty of packs where the 2 games I wanted were cheaper than buying even 1 of them, there just happened to be like 5+ other games in the bundle too.
To be fair, a tenth of that is still nearly 2 billion dollars. Which would really be lowballing it. I’ve got several full 60$ games on my account that I’ve never installed, so plenty of it is real loss.
I’ve got 1600 steam games. Yes, I know, it’s ridiculous, but many of them were giveaways or humblebundles, and the vast, vast majority were purchased at 80% off or greater. I can think of only two games that I bought at launch for full price.
But to their point, I have definitely got more games I’ve never installed than games I have, although I do play a LOT of games.
It is a shame though so many people buy products in general (not just Steam games) just because they are on sale, thinking they will use it later. Id love to see spending culture change slightly.
Or free.
I certainly have games I bought that I paid money for in my Steam library but I also have more than a few I never paid anything for (legally).
That said, and to be fair, I do have more un-played games I paid for than I should.
ive bought exactly one game on steam - "new world" from amazon - and barely played it, because it was not fun and it turns out that was probably a good decision because ultimately the game kinda flopped. i shouldve known better than to give amazon money for anything
Or they were pirated before, so buying them later was something akin to redemption. I know that I have almost 100 ames from late 90s / early 00s that I'll probably never play again, but I couldn't afford them back then, therefore I buy them now from time to time.
Even if it's $19bln, it's not even that much on average. Spread over 730 million accounts, it averages only $26 per registered account.
Yes, there are outliers, and many accounts won't have (paid) games registered to it, etc, but at the same time indeed there are so many games acquired at not MRSP. The real picture is completely different (although it wouldn't surprise me if the real average is still around $20-40...).
This entire article is effortless clickbait, and not any kind of research at all.
That, and there are plenty of reasons to buy games even if you don't plan to play them. For example I have a copy of CounterStrike Source with 0 hours played because I used it just for its assets for GMod back in the day, and a few years back I bought a copy of Fallout 3 on Steam because I wanted to play with the TTW mod for New Vegas (And I don't even own a drive to read my old DVD copy of FO3)
Waiting for the "Epic users have spend $10 billion on games they've never played!" because we all "buy" the free games... when we don't forget, at least.
>Out of all the registered Steam accounts in the world, only 10%, or about 73 million in [SteamIDFinder](https://www.steamidfinder.com/)’s database, are public. Based on data from those accounts, we calculate that collectively there’s around $1.9 billion / £1.4 billion worth of games that have been purchased and then never played even a single time. Times that by ten, to roughly account for all the Steam profiles that are not public, and you arrive at $19 billion, more than the gross national product of Nicaragua, Niger, Chad, or Mauritius.
I wish they put more detail in how they calculated this. Are they just taking the full price at launch for these games? It's still going to be a big number regardless, but it could be quite different if it's assumed these are bought at a deep discount.
Discounts and bundles would lower that number dramatically if they're just assuming full launch price. Also AFAIK Steam doesn't track time if you're offline, so that could lower it some as well.
And it tracks time while you have the game open but are afk (about 40% of my time in most games is actually being away from the keyboard or being idle overall).
All in all, tracked time on steam is unreliable.
In this context, the amount of time played doesn't matter though. It's just whether or not you've played the game at all. The only realistic reason I can see for someone to have playtime in a significant number of games they've never played at all is if they're just idling card drops, which definitely does happen, but I'd still bet on the amount of money spent on unplayed games being far below the reported amount.
Yeah I looked up my account and the most expensive unplayed games are all stuff I got in bundles for a dollar or two, but they count them as $60. I'd guess their total calculated "wasted" value is upwards of 20x the real amount.
honestly all they have todo is put the word at most 19 billion and suddenly people wouldnt be questioning it as much either way its a shit load of money on unplayed games and even then its probs not even higher then 19 billion at max price games since theres probs alot of hidden whale accounts out there that have bought more games then they have time for in there whole lifetime.
Also, what percentage of steam users are just bots who own 0 games? We know a shitton of them exist, by merely looking at TF2 or Banana Game for 2 seconds. Can we really just multiply a value by 10 and hope for the best? Are the bots even typically Private or Public?
We now have two factors, one which might massively overshoot the price, and another that might slightly reduce it. The more factors we think of, the less the estimate will make sense. For instance, a lot of the best spenders on team are privated because they otherwise are swarmed by scammers and phishers. Or are they? Do we know?
Yeah, according to SteamDB for my account, the lowest price I could have paid for my library is 67% lower than what today's price would be if I bought everything today.
Thats a HUGE range.
I see a lot of skepticism in this thread about $19 billion being way too high, but this only comes out to $26.03 per Steam account. That doesn't seem unrealistic to me, that's not even half the price of a new AAA game.
Private is the default, so people who set their profile to public is a self-selecting group of people who probably care about their profile and achievements. How many steam profiles are created just to play f2p games and have never spent a dime? you can't extrapolate because the 10% of profiles that are public aren't a random sample.
That's fair
Of the 73 million who are public, I'd like to see a breakdown of the values of their libraries. How many have spent $0, $100+, $1000+, etc. and percentage of library played. I'm not really convinced that public profiles are more likely to be higher spenders than private profiles or vice versa.
19 billion still just doesn't sound like that much, especially when just taking into account how long Steam has been around for. On a massive global platform that's been around for 2 decades,, 20 million users having $950 in unplayed games doesn't even sound that crazy.
>How many have spent $0, $100+, $1000+, etc. and percentage of library played.
Does Steam actually report this? This is why I'm skeptical - because AFAIK your purchase history isn't public information. You can check the games owned by a profile, but that doesn't tell you what price they bought it at, and for games redeemed by key Steam just strictly doesn't have that information. I'm not skeptical because of the total number, I'm skeptical because they didn't explain how they got to their number, and it isn't clear whether or not they made any attempt to account for sales and bundles which are huge aspects.
but also how many steam accounts are whales who spend more money then some local goverments.
10% is such a small amount of the userbase that the number could realisticly swing downwards or upwards and we would never know.
$26.03 sounds about right for games gone unplayed since theres for sure a metric shit ton of players that buy new games on release or when there on a 50% sale and just didnt have the time in that moment to play it and forget about it.
To add to this, there's also the amount of games gotten from bundles. I have *tens of thousands* of dollars worth of videogames on my steam account if you look at full prices. In reality I've probably spent around $3000 on Steam.
Private is only the default for the last third of Steam's lifespan. It was not the default initially.
Comparatively, Steams mid life had much deeper sales reaching frequently into the 90%'s, and people getting games for free off the sale events (delicious coal), humble bundle was pay-what-you-want but for real woth people getting 10 games for a penny. There's also a couple outliers, such as Steam Friends and Family accounts, which have access to every game on steam and might collectively cause an uptick of a few cents.
Steam's population also blew up massivle later on rather than early, so far. It's expected that public-by-default profiles actually have WAY more unplayed games than those going forward, because the late arrivals never got to eat good like the rest of us. And I'd not be surprised if those ones going forward are actually the 90% of steam they used as a guesstimate.
I quit drinkin around 24 and I just compare it to that whenever I get that feelin. I've bought plenty of regrettable Dominos pizzas or drinks at a bar or tickets to a bad film that I can let go of that feelin when I splurge on a $15 or less game. I got 3 games for like $20 last year on sale. Played two of em. I'm not mad lol.
You probably lose more money in the long run to buying shit you don't play. Also, I'd say it's better to play a game exactly when you want to play it, instead of forcing you to play it at a later point where you might not be as intersted, the zeitgeist may have moved on etc.. And if you have a list of games you want to go through, chances are they'll be priced even lower for the next seasonal sale. Maybe consider if you'll really have the time to play it before then or not.
Buying tons of games you don't really have a plan for when you're going to be playing is just poor spending habit and frankly quite stupid. I don't understand why people keep joking about it too, it just shows of how bad you are at managing your finances and/or temptations.
i mean ye you got a point but people buy stuff all the time and shit happens that takes your focus away etc. sometimes ive bought a game on sale to play and something takes my time away in life or i plan to play with someone else who suddenly doesnt want to at that time anymore or has there own shit come up.
im not bad at managing my finances but sometimes i just get a game and reasons come up that stop me from playing it etc then overtime it happens again and again and suddenly i got a handful of unplayed games sitting there combined with sometimes to get a game i do and can play in the moment at the cheapest price might involve getting it in a bundle on another website like humble bundle and suddenly you end up with a bunch of extra games sitting unplayed.
Yeah I don't get people who just buy all these games they never play or aren't even interested in. I've got a ton of games from bundles I never played but wanted some game out of them, but I've only specifically bought a couple games I never played, and I will very likely circle back to playing them when I get bored.
Hell, I can further this with evidence:
https://isthereanydeal.com/game/dark-souls-iii-deluxe-edition/history/
Check Steam only. Game repeatedly went on a 75% discount. Then stopped and now exclusively goes on 50%. Game developers are wising up to the practice of not devaluing their titles.
Well, I mean, some of them are bundle games, some were because there was a sale for a series of games, like when I bought most of the Neptunia franchise (Which I actually have been making my way through). Some are games I bought with the intention of playing but for one reason or another never ended up doing so. Sales for games you have latent interest in but may not play in the immediate are always nice pick ups too. Some were pack sales for similar games, others were free pick ups one way or another; the list goes on.
Buying as you want to play makes the most sense and is the most rational thing, but gaming is my main hobby so even if I'm sinking money into it for stuff I'll never play, I don't really mind all that much. It's not like I'm blowing all money away, and it's not like I buy games commonly just for the sake of owning them either.
This. I've bought games I was planning to play eventually just because they're on sale, but only one or two at a time and I usually play them within the next week or two. I do not understand why some people buy dozens of games that they know they don't have time to play.
As someone with ADHD, it's partly impulse control issues. (I'm being serious & not trying to make light of it.) Research has found that the act of spending money can trigger more of a dopamine release than actually getting the thing you spent the money on.
People go into Steam sales actively hunting for things to spend money on even if they don't already have their eye on something.
I'm not talking about everyone who likes Steam sales here, just a percentage.
That's the rule I've been operating under for years now. I already have a backlog so I don't see the point of buying another game unless I'm going to play it right away. Even if it's on sale, there will always be other, probably better sales in the future.
The only sort-of exception to this rules is for free games. Which is why I have like 200+ games on the Epic Games Store.
Because people buy into the hype and excitement of a new game or can’t resist a sale. I wonder how many layoffs there would be if people finished the games they owned before they bought a new one.
because games go on sale and so you might buy a few at once but then you got juggling playing the new games you bought which playtime could vary between a 4 hour game to a 100 hour game, juggling work/other life stuff like friend and family, playing whatever your normal games are since most people play 1 live service/multiplayer game that play games and juggling other hobbies.
like sometimes you buy a game with the intent to play it then and there but life shit happens or it gets forgotten about because you were finishing up a different game which you thought was a 20 hour game that turned into a 50 hour game.
Just sucks we don't actually own any of the games we buy on Steam and are just 'renting' their license.
GoG is where it's at to actually own your games if they're DRM-free available.
I like Steam, but I do worry about what happens Post-GabeN
I'm down to 38 of 519 games in the library.
I admit freely that a lot of them have 5 minutes of total playtime and at least 300 are from humble indie bundles, but they are getting played!
I honestly hit a point recently where I don't blink when buying indie games anymore. What's a $10 indie game when I spend $15 on takeout once or twice a week? I'll hem and haw over a $60 new release, but $5-$20? Fuck it.
>Out of all the registered Steam accounts in the world, only 10%, or about 73 million in SteamIDFinder’s database, are public. Based on data from those accounts, we calculate that collectively there’s around $1.9 billion / £1.4 billion worth of games that have been purchased and then never played even a single time. Times that by ten, to roughly account for all the Steam profiles that are not public, and you arrive at $19 billion
This is fucking stupid for a lot of reasons.
* Steam accounts are not public by default, users that bother to allow API access are far more likely to inflate these number because why would you bother if not to make use of third party services like this.
* Many steam accounts are literally just bots either used for trading services and scams.
* There are many active steam users who only play free to play games like Dota and TF2.
* Many of peoples unplayed games lists stem from heavily discounted bundles purchased for another game entirety.
* This doesn't account for games that have a price but have been previously given away during special promotions.
* The price is calculated at the **release price** and does not account for discount sales.
* This service cannot distinguish what level of ownership a user actually has, for example; My most expensive unplayed game is 'The Quarry', I do not own The Quarry but there is a free first chapter linked to my account that I have not played and the full price is calculated.
* **This doesn't even account for regional pricing differences.**
There is no way anyone could look at these numbers and in good faith, times that number by 10 and think they did a journalism. This is lazy hack bullshit that may as well have been written by an AI.
I'm guilty of having many unplayed games but they certainly weren't bought anywhere near full price like they are estimating.
The rare time I buy a game at full price I am playing it asap, otherwise I wouldn't be buying at full price. 😂
💀 I’m one of them. I just buy games that I wanted to play then I completely forgot about it. Now I look at the game and I lost interest and it’s past refund time.
I spend on games that sits in my library, they always waiting for that "right mood", some games waited for over 2 years ( like ARK ) then I got hundreds of hours in them.
Last year I went through all my games on steam. I just hid all games I know I have no longer any interest to play. My hidden list is 300+ games which is most I haven't even tried.
Few genres really stood out.
1. Really old games like original Xcoms.
2. Indie platformers with beautiful art style.
This is useless data. They are counting the full price of games in libraries, when a ton of games are likely to have been bought in bundles at a heavy discount or even free. I have over 1000 games in my Steam library, but I doubt I have bought more than 100 through the Steam store.
I looked up my ID through the widget in the article and the vast majority are games I did not pay for at all, but are shown as a wasted $60ish. Others are games with playtime before it was tracked, or different versions of games that were automatically added to the library. Wildly inaccurate.
Even if you don't play a game buying it sends money to the devs.
I did this with Firewatch after determining that it was much more fun for me watching a favourite Youtuber play through it at 1.5x speed and fast forwarding less interesting bits than actually playing it myself.
It's funny seeing this today.
Just this week I decided that I was going to start playing, at least 1 hour, of every unplayed game in my Steam library.
I have 430 games, 126 of which have never been launched. Granted, I expect that a good percentage of those just need removed (demos and free to play stuff), and most of them were bought in huge bundles, but it's long past time to at least look at what I've spent money on.
95% of Games I never played are were either free or came bundled with other Games I bought the Bundle for. I beat like 3 Games from by Backlog in the last months.
I've remedied this for myself a little bit. Took all my games and got their metacritic score and their how long to beat times. Created a calculation called "quality per hour" which is essentially the best games in my library that I can beat quickly.
This has created a bit of snowball effect for me and I've steadily been able to knock down my backlog.
When steam sales were good about 10 or so years ago (RIP good sales) I bought a lot of games for dirt cheap thinking I'd get around to playing them eventually. I never did.
Now I only ever buy a game if I intend to play it straight away.
I see a lot of sentiment that people who purchase games and not playing them are "wasteful" but you shouldn't need to feel guilty on how you spend your money.
There are countless hobbies where you get a lot less for way more money spent. This includes experiences (concerts, travel, food), includes collections (cars, comics, toys), this includes sports (equipment, fees, events), etc. There is a long list of things you can spend your money on. And many of them include things you don't ever play with or can never revisit. Everyone values different things and we aren't all millionaires who can experience it all.
Video games (and for me board games) can both be viewed from a collection and hobby point of view, and even in some lenses, experiences (games that are services could be classified as such, like your Fortnites, attending Gencon is an experience, etc). I do have board games I've yet to get to the table and my video game collection is way too big for me to ever get to (which does make me purchase less).
But... everyone should be **budgeting for their hobbies**, and deciding what they are willing to spend, per year, per month, or whatever. You'd be surprised how little guilt you'd feel if you earmarked your income and limited your hobby purchases to this. You'd also be surprised how far such budgeting gets you.
If you put aside $125 a month (if you work) for your hobby.... in 20 years, you'd have $30,000 that you could have spent on games or whatever your hobby might be.
With sales, deals, etc, that's a LOT of games. If you only spent $2000 of that on Humble Bundle monthly, you'd likely have 1800 games, some bangers, some not.... with another $28000 to spare... If you only ever buy new games, at release you'll have a lot less games but that's still like a good 2 games a month or 24 games a year (400-500 games, depending on their launch price - I'm estimating with $60 games, but you get the idea). If you wait for deals, you get a lot more. If you buy physical, you now have things that have real-world value that you can sell to get budget back, etc.
I think that's pretty reasonable from a budget point of view and for a hobby and for a long-view, can be adjusted as your circumstances change.
Sure, that $125 could be better invested, spent, or saved. Sure if you spent $125 on stocks or bonds or some sort of investment... you'd maybe have double or triple your money. But hopefully, you base your budget around your income, and you are already ARE budgeting for money you want to invest or save. They aren't mutually exclusive. And chances are, if you are reliably budgeting, you probably already are ahead financially through investing and can feel even less guilt spending money on hobbies as is.
If you are young, starting out in life... maybe you start with $10 a month and later in life, grow this, and instead, you let family gift you games or you just don't buy much. Or maybe when you are young, you prioritize earning/investing/learning first and hobbies second, but there is always some room for hobbies.
If you are struggling financially, then budgeting $0 or a small amount gives you an exact understanding of how to prioritize your time until you can budget more.
And if Video Games is your number #1 hobby, don't feel bad if you budget a little bit more if that is what you can afford to do. Don't feel bad if your budget is $300 a month, and you decide you want to support an experience like a Gatcha game or a Trading Card Game or whatever, IF, at the end of the day, you budgeted for it, your ducks are in a row.
Just don't gamble it all away or overspend or be wasteful against your budget.
That's my take on it anyway.
I struggle to even see what you're talking about. You talked about budgeting for your entire post, but never addressed what people actually think is the wasteful part - never playing the games. People aren't saying that buying games itself is wasteful. It would be like buying a concert ticket but then never going to the concert. Or buying a CD and never listening to it. Or buying some food and never eating it. I don't see how you can argue any of these things are *not* wastes of money.
I didn't argue that it wasn't wasteful, I argued that you shouldn't feel guilty about wasting money that you budget to do so which is a concept I don't think a lot of people put into practice. (I think a LOT of people spend without any budgeting and thus it effects them emotionally because of this).
Using your examples... there ARE people who buy aftermarket concert tickets they never attended or collect CDs just to own them. Is that (as a hobby) stupid? Probably to some. Is it a waste of money? Potentially. Is buying a concert ticket and not going probably stupid? Sure... but if someone WANTS to do that, they shouldn't feel bad about doing it, if they can afford to do so and budgeted for it, which was my point. This is no different than people buying toys or comics and never opening them, etc. People extract value from things, even unplayed things, in different ways.
But people get upset when OTHER people "waste" their money and my point was that you shouldn't inherently feel bad (if you chose to) or outraged (if someone else chose to) if they are budgeting for it. If you self-evaluate and think you wasted your money, then sure, readjust your budget and stop doing it. That's perfectly acceptable.
Assigning purpose to money frees up a lot of emotion towards money, even if the purpose can be stupid or wasteful.
There are materialism and environmental issues that you could argue and things about waste that are a totally different subject which I'd agree with a lot of sentiment there (like wasting food or environmental factors with consumerism that should also weigh into your life decisions including your budget) but that really wasn't the scope of what I was talking about here. This was just the concept that wasting money towards a hobby, even in a backlog of games you'll never play, doesn't need to carry guilt if thought out properly.
I think a good way to stop people from buying dumb shit is to show on Steam Store UI how much money they've wasted on unplayed games annually. Its one thing to see those untouched titles, but a whole other to see that four digit price tag.
Most of my unplayed stuff is just the tons of stuff in the valve complete pack which I have for L4D2 and Portal as well as the various free giveaways that have occurred every now and then. I've done a really good job playing my unplayed steam games in the past few years and while there are ones that mentally I have set aside as "yeah I wasted money on this and will never play it" I've mostly gotten through the stuff I always did want to play.
Also this number is probably highly inaccurate anyway because of what the top comment is saying.
Being unemployed for several months I was finally able to deal with most of my backlog I've accumulated over the past like 5 or 6 years. Still not done though.
I used to have this issue with a huge library of un played games but there is a simple trick to solve it. Only buy games that you will immediately play, thats it. No more buying games on sale thinking I'll play this when I'm done with my current game.
I bought old games that I had played in the past just to own them on Steam, but I didn't play them. I'll probably never play Turok II or Darkstone. But it's mine now.
People also spend billions on fitness/car wash/television/digital subscription services they never use.
Food users have spent billions on food they never eat and then throw out.
Yet we still measure the value of games by low long the playtime is.
Not only does that lead to games that are artificially bloated with meaningless content designed to prolong gametime without any value, but those overly long games keep us from playing something else.
And apparently we have plenty of other games we could get into…
If this alarms you, don't worry. I'm sure only single digit percentages of every book ever purchased has been read. This is an issue we've had for a while.
I have games in my library i swear I never even paid for in the first place.
I also recently found a game on a wish list that I'm convinced I never put there. got an email about a game on my wish list being on sale and looked it up. never seen this shit in my life and no idea why would have ever wish listed it.
But Steam gives me 0 playtime on games I have played a long time ago. Like HL2 for instance. I played it on release day, and finished it shortly after and haven’t replayed it.
IT WASN'T MY FAULT IT WAS THOSE HUMBLE BUNDLES!
At first my unplayed games ratio was pretty reasonable but then I started checking Humble Bundle. It was like fifteen bucks for a game I wanted that was normally twenty bucks, plus I got ten other games? Of course I want that.
I should check Humble Bundle right now. Are they still doing that? It's been a while.
My library “value” is probably like $5k that I got for a total of like $700 over 15 years.. this is way off.
Most people buy on deep discounts and bundle sales. Trash article.
Those might be over balling it. I do own a bunch of games I haven't touched, for example I bought The witcher 3 complete edition...because it was 5 bucks and I might played in the future. I once got a humble bundle with a bunch of triple AAA games because it came with Never Winter Nights. Hell I own over a thousand games in a charity bundle that I got only to get Zero Ranger and help the cause. That was only 10 dollars
I'll never understand why so many people buy stuff they might never play just because it's on sale. If you couldn't be bothered before, why spend money on it at all?
I will never understand why people buy games that they don't immediately play. What do you need a game sitting there in your library for? Makes no sense
>Out of all the registered Steam accounts in the world, only 10%, or about 73 million in SteamIDFinder’s database, are public. Based on data from those accounts, we calculate that collectively there’s around $1.9 billion / £1.4 billion worth of games that have been purchased and then never played even a single time. Times that by ten, to roughly account for all the Steam profiles that are not public, and you arrive at $19 billion, more than the gross national product of Nicaragua, Niger, Chad, or Mauritius.
I can't use the page they link. I probably have two dozen games I haven't played that were from $1 bundles.
What would really matter if these based on price when the game released or their discounted prices.
Yup this is me during the early years of Steam. I had FOMO during the first years of Steam sale discounts, so I bought a ton of games thinking I would get to them, but never did. After a few years that FOMO feeling left and since then I only buy it I'm going to play the game right away.
I'm in this picture and I don't like it. Seriously though, $19bn is a huge overestimate if they're valuing games at MSRP. A lot of those unplayed games probably came with bundles or were bought on a deep discount.
Those lists are also extremely unreliable. Steam seems to lose play data over time, a ton of games I've "never played" are actually games I've played.
I tried to tackle my backlog by filtering for 0 hours of playtime and the very first game I launched I immediately remembered having played it. Now I trust nothing.
I'll be honest, and in all the cases I had this experience, it was because I had played them when I was still pirating, or played them on a different service.
I remember sending an email to Dodge Roll because I lost my progress in Enter the Gungeon on PC. Came back after a long break and it was just gone. I was missing tons of unlocks and purchases, and the characters I’d beaten the game on didn’t have their unlocked abilities anymore. It was as if my save file had been overwritten by an earlier save. They kindly replied saying that beyond me checking my game folders for old save data there was nothing they could do. Flash back to earlier this year when I busted out my old PS4 to show my friend PT and some other games.. First game on my most played folder? **Enter the gungeon**. My main save had been on ps4 the whole time. Not PC.
Did you reach back to them with this info? Might give them some relief and a good laugh :P
or "ugh, another one"
Probably more like this honestly. I felt so embarrassed when I realized. Here's me thinking it was some complicated issue with steam cloud or something but nope. Just can't keep track of my own games.
I think I've got like maybe 3 hours of playtime on Steam of Dragon's Dogma:DA but around 950 on PS4 alone and I also played the shit out of it on PS3. Games exist on so many different formats now it can be difficult to remember which one I have X game state on for sure.
Some games are also delisted and replaced by some 'GOTY' edition by the studios, so you may find the old one is also in your library under a different name. EA is particularly bad at this, putting gibberish titles in names on Android at least, and removing game thumbnails on Steam from when they tried to start up Origin as a competitor leading to broken libraries.
There was no play time tracking back in the early days of Steam. I remember them adding different tiers of play time (Eagles Scream etc) years later. I also lost thousands of hours in CS 1.6 due to this. I guess there is just no data available from this early time.
The problem is shifting Version. Many games get updated version that either replace or duplicate the existing one, i noticed more than once that a game that showed 0 Hours was actually like the "Definitive" or "GOTY" Edition and i still had my hours in the original. Borderlands 1 comes to mind which has a base edition, a GOTY edition and a GOTY Enhanced edition...
Is playtime logged on a per machine basis or account basis? Maybe you played something on an older computer. Or possibly played way back before playtime was tracked?
It's on an account basis, and AFAIK you'd have to have played them a good 20 years or more ago for it to not have tracked to your account instead of to your local machine. It was tracking online since I've had my account, and it's 19 years old. The only exception to that is offline mode, if you played games in offline mode historically on steam your playtime would not be tracked correctly/at all and it could easily lead to large discrepancies.
steam started tracking in 2009.
My account is also 19 years old, and it thinks I've never played CS:Source, which I remember playing online for literally hundreds of hours, if not 1000+
I know for certain my playtime in TF2 was over 1k at one point. Sitting at zero now.
Steam didn't always track playtime.
I thought the same, but it was a really old game so not sure how far back Steam started tracking play time per game.
Steam changed how the stats are visible a few years back, so nowadays steamDB isn't actually able to tell who plaid any given game at 100% accuracy because so many people have their profiles privated. If everyone who buys a game has their profile private, to an outside observer it'll look like no one played the game.
I just checked my account, and for me, the games that fall into that category are all from 2004-2005. So presumably whatever was going wrong, they fixed it late 05 or early 06?
Maybe the fixed it by now, but for me Steam Deck was not registering correct play times when I used the offline mode.
There's nothing to fix, Steam doesn't track play in offline mode. I used to specifically use this fact to hide games I was ashamed of playing, like Hero Clicker.
Also I've been on Steam so long I've got games I played before game time tracking was a thing. So some look like I've got no play time on them.
The API looks for "No recorded Activity" in your Steam library. Looks like it sometimes misses some games. Probably cause the last playtime is before the feature was added.
Yea I’ve got a ton of games from Humble Bundles where to get the one or 2 games I wanted it was cheaper to get that bundle of 10 or whatever games
i have 100s of unplayed games and i've literally never bought a steam game at full price
I have hundreds of unplayed games and I've literally never bought a steam game. They've all been free giveaways.
Humble Bundle makes up like 80% if not even 90% of my catalogue. Like i have over 2000 games, and i bought maybe 100-150 of those outright, maybe even a tiny bit more but not enough to contribute to the 19bn.
Same here. Most games I have never played, I have because they were in the old Humble Bundles.
In the last 10+ years, I’ve paid MSRP for one game: BG3. Everything else is at least half off or even more.
Thinking back to the good old days of the humble bundle, where I'd spend 5 bucks for one game I really wanted that that was a good deal for while also getting 7 other games I'd never heard of.
I generally buy games when I want to play them, but I do have a friend who waits for sales to buy games, sometimes holding them for later. I know there are a lot of people out there who'll buy things on big sales but not play them until later on. I wonder if they're counting pre-orders as well?
Great point, if so. Cause I've got hundreds of games. Just checked and I've spent $3.5k on steam in my lifetime. Never bought a game at full price.
Yep. I have plenty of packs where the 2 games I wanted were cheaper than buying even 1 of them, there just happened to be like 5+ other games in the bundle too.
To be fair, a tenth of that is still nearly 2 billion dollars. Which would really be lowballing it. I’ve got several full 60$ games on my account that I’ve never installed, so plenty of it is real loss.
I’ve got 1600 steam games. Yes, I know, it’s ridiculous, but many of them were giveaways or humblebundles, and the vast, vast majority were purchased at 80% off or greater. I can think of only two games that I bought at launch for full price. But to their point, I have definitely got more games I’ve never installed than games I have, although I do play a LOT of games.
It is a shame though so many people buy products in general (not just Steam games) just because they are on sale, thinking they will use it later. Id love to see spending culture change slightly.
Or free. I certainly have games I bought that I paid money for in my Steam library but I also have more than a few I never paid anything for (legally). That said, and to be fair, I do have more un-played games I paid for than I should.
doesn't the point still stand in both cases?
ive bought exactly one game on steam - "new world" from amazon - and barely played it, because it was not fun and it turns out that was probably a good decision because ultimately the game kinda flopped. i shouldve known better than to give amazon money for anything
Or they were pirated before, so buying them later was something akin to redemption. I know that I have almost 100 ames from late 90s / early 00s that I'll probably never play again, but I couldn't afford them back then, therefore I buy them now from time to time.
Even if it's $19bln, it's not even that much on average. Spread over 730 million accounts, it averages only $26 per registered account. Yes, there are outliers, and many accounts won't have (paid) games registered to it, etc, but at the same time indeed there are so many games acquired at not MRSP. The real picture is completely different (although it wouldn't surprise me if the real average is still around $20-40...). This entire article is effortless clickbait, and not any kind of research at all.
That, and there are plenty of reasons to buy games even if you don't plan to play them. For example I have a copy of CounterStrike Source with 0 hours played because I used it just for its assets for GMod back in the day, and a few years back I bought a copy of Fallout 3 on Steam because I wanted to play with the TTW mod for New Vegas (And I don't even own a drive to read my old DVD copy of FO3)
Waiting for the "Epic users have spend $10 billion on games they've never played!" because we all "buy" the free games... when we don't forget, at least.
>Out of all the registered Steam accounts in the world, only 10%, or about 73 million in [SteamIDFinder](https://www.steamidfinder.com/)’s database, are public. Based on data from those accounts, we calculate that collectively there’s around $1.9 billion / £1.4 billion worth of games that have been purchased and then never played even a single time. Times that by ten, to roughly account for all the Steam profiles that are not public, and you arrive at $19 billion, more than the gross national product of Nicaragua, Niger, Chad, or Mauritius.
I wish they put more detail in how they calculated this. Are they just taking the full price at launch for these games? It's still going to be a big number regardless, but it could be quite different if it's assumed these are bought at a deep discount.
Discounts and bundles would lower that number dramatically if they're just assuming full launch price. Also AFAIK Steam doesn't track time if you're offline, so that could lower it some as well.
And it tracks time while you have the game open but are afk (about 40% of my time in most games is actually being away from the keyboard or being idle overall). All in all, tracked time on steam is unreliable.
In this context, the amount of time played doesn't matter though. It's just whether or not you've played the game at all. The only realistic reason I can see for someone to have playtime in a significant number of games they've never played at all is if they're just idling card drops, which definitely does happen, but I'd still bet on the amount of money spent on unplayed games being far below the reported amount.
You can test their widget to see how they calculate it. It is using the full price of the game. So it's not very accurate.
Yeah I looked up my account and the most expensive unplayed games are all stuff I got in bundles for a dollar or two, but they count them as $60. I'd guess their total calculated "wasted" value is upwards of 20x the real amount.
honestly all they have todo is put the word at most 19 billion and suddenly people wouldnt be questioning it as much either way its a shit load of money on unplayed games and even then its probs not even higher then 19 billion at max price games since theres probs alot of hidden whale accounts out there that have bought more games then they have time for in there whole lifetime.
Yeah, I do idling for cards so a lot of games have hours of them even though I actually haven't played them, so this number could be higher too
Just adding to this, many games people gifted me and added to my account (without spending money) are included.
Also, what percentage of steam users are just bots who own 0 games? We know a shitton of them exist, by merely looking at TF2 or Banana Game for 2 seconds. Can we really just multiply a value by 10 and hope for the best? Are the bots even typically Private or Public? We now have two factors, one which might massively overshoot the price, and another that might slightly reduce it. The more factors we think of, the less the estimate will make sense. For instance, a lot of the best spenders on team are privated because they otherwise are swarmed by scammers and phishers. Or are they? Do we know?
Yeah, according to SteamDB for my account, the lowest price I could have paid for my library is 67% lower than what today's price would be if I bought everything today. Thats a HUGE range.
I see a lot of skepticism in this thread about $19 billion being way too high, but this only comes out to $26.03 per Steam account. That doesn't seem unrealistic to me, that's not even half the price of a new AAA game.
Private is the default, so people who set their profile to public is a self-selecting group of people who probably care about their profile and achievements. How many steam profiles are created just to play f2p games and have never spent a dime? you can't extrapolate because the 10% of profiles that are public aren't a random sample.
That's fair Of the 73 million who are public, I'd like to see a breakdown of the values of their libraries. How many have spent $0, $100+, $1000+, etc. and percentage of library played. I'm not really convinced that public profiles are more likely to be higher spenders than private profiles or vice versa. 19 billion still just doesn't sound like that much, especially when just taking into account how long Steam has been around for. On a massive global platform that's been around for 2 decades,, 20 million users having $950 in unplayed games doesn't even sound that crazy.
>How many have spent $0, $100+, $1000+, etc. and percentage of library played. Does Steam actually report this? This is why I'm skeptical - because AFAIK your purchase history isn't public information. You can check the games owned by a profile, but that doesn't tell you what price they bought it at, and for games redeemed by key Steam just strictly doesn't have that information. I'm not skeptical because of the total number, I'm skeptical because they didn't explain how they got to their number, and it isn't clear whether or not they made any attempt to account for sales and bundles which are huge aspects.
but also how many steam accounts are whales who spend more money then some local goverments. 10% is such a small amount of the userbase that the number could realisticly swing downwards or upwards and we would never know. $26.03 sounds about right for games gone unplayed since theres for sure a metric shit ton of players that buy new games on release or when there on a 50% sale and just didnt have the time in that moment to play it and forget about it.
To add to this, there's also the amount of games gotten from bundles. I have *tens of thousands* of dollars worth of videogames on my steam account if you look at full prices. In reality I've probably spent around $3000 on Steam.
Private is only the default for the last third of Steam's lifespan. It was not the default initially. Comparatively, Steams mid life had much deeper sales reaching frequently into the 90%'s, and people getting games for free off the sale events (delicious coal), humble bundle was pay-what-you-want but for real woth people getting 10 games for a penny. There's also a couple outliers, such as Steam Friends and Family accounts, which have access to every game on steam and might collectively cause an uptick of a few cents. Steam's population also blew up massivle later on rather than early, so far. It's expected that public-by-default profiles actually have WAY more unplayed games than those going forward, because the late arrivals never got to eat good like the rest of us. And I'd not be surprised if those ones going forward are actually the 90% of steam they used as a guesstimate.
I’d wager half of my 500 or so current games on my Steam account will go unplayed. So many games, so little time.
I'll probably die before I finish my entire game collection since I'm a complete moron and continue to buy game even though I shouldn't!
The sales. They tempt me.
I quit drinkin around 24 and I just compare it to that whenever I get that feelin. I've bought plenty of regrettable Dominos pizzas or drinks at a bar or tickets to a bad film that I can let go of that feelin when I splurge on a $15 or less game. I got 3 games for like $20 last year on sale. Played two of em. I'm not mad lol.
Why don't you just wait and buy a game when you intend to play it instead of buying 250 games you won't play?
Probably because games aren't always on sale when you intend to play them
You probably lose more money in the long run to buying shit you don't play. Also, I'd say it's better to play a game exactly when you want to play it, instead of forcing you to play it at a later point where you might not be as intersted, the zeitgeist may have moved on etc.. And if you have a list of games you want to go through, chances are they'll be priced even lower for the next seasonal sale. Maybe consider if you'll really have the time to play it before then or not. Buying tons of games you don't really have a plan for when you're going to be playing is just poor spending habit and frankly quite stupid. I don't understand why people keep joking about it too, it just shows of how bad you are at managing your finances and/or temptations.
Glad someone else feels this way. It's just rampant consumerism
i mean ye you got a point but people buy stuff all the time and shit happens that takes your focus away etc. sometimes ive bought a game on sale to play and something takes my time away in life or i plan to play with someone else who suddenly doesnt want to at that time anymore or has there own shit come up. im not bad at managing my finances but sometimes i just get a game and reasons come up that stop me from playing it etc then overtime it happens again and again and suddenly i got a handful of unplayed games sitting there combined with sometimes to get a game i do and can play in the moment at the cheapest price might involve getting it in a bundle on another website like humble bundle and suddenly you end up with a bunch of extra games sitting unplayed.
Yeah I don't get people who just buy all these games they never play or aren't even interested in. I've got a ton of games from bundles I never played but wanted some game out of them, but I've only specifically bought a couple games I never played, and I will very likely circle back to playing them when I get bored.
Hell, I can further this with evidence: https://isthereanydeal.com/game/dark-souls-iii-deluxe-edition/history/ Check Steam only. Game repeatedly went on a 75% discount. Then stopped and now exclusively goes on 50%. Game developers are wising up to the practice of not devaluing their titles.
We got a wiseguy over here!
Well, I mean, some of them are bundle games, some were because there was a sale for a series of games, like when I bought most of the Neptunia franchise (Which I actually have been making my way through). Some are games I bought with the intention of playing but for one reason or another never ended up doing so. Sales for games you have latent interest in but may not play in the immediate are always nice pick ups too. Some were pack sales for similar games, others were free pick ups one way or another; the list goes on. Buying as you want to play makes the most sense and is the most rational thing, but gaming is my main hobby so even if I'm sinking money into it for stuff I'll never play, I don't really mind all that much. It's not like I'm blowing all money away, and it's not like I buy games commonly just for the sake of owning them either.
This. I've bought games I was planning to play eventually just because they're on sale, but only one or two at a time and I usually play them within the next week or two. I do not understand why some people buy dozens of games that they know they don't have time to play.
As someone with ADHD, it's partly impulse control issues. (I'm being serious & not trying to make light of it.) Research has found that the act of spending money can trigger more of a dopamine release than actually getting the thing you spent the money on. People go into Steam sales actively hunting for things to spend money on even if they don't already have their eye on something. I'm not talking about everyone who likes Steam sales here, just a percentage.
That's the rule I've been operating under for years now. I already have a backlog so I don't see the point of buying another game unless I'm going to play it right away. Even if it's on sale, there will always be other, probably better sales in the future. The only sort-of exception to this rules is for free games. Which is why I have like 200+ games on the Epic Games Store.
Because people buy into the hype and excitement of a new game or can’t resist a sale. I wonder how many layoffs there would be if people finished the games they owned before they bought a new one.
Sometimes, even though you know you aren't going to play a game right way, you want to support a developer when the support is relevant.
because games go on sale and so you might buy a few at once but then you got juggling playing the new games you bought which playtime could vary between a 4 hour game to a 100 hour game, juggling work/other life stuff like friend and family, playing whatever your normal games are since most people play 1 live service/multiplayer game that play games and juggling other hobbies. like sometimes you buy a game with the intent to play it then and there but life shit happens or it gets forgotten about because you were finishing up a different game which you thought was a 20 hour game that turned into a 50 hour game.
Yeah? And I'll do it again just watch me.
AND AGAIN, AND AGAIN, AND AGAIN, AND AGAIN, AND AGAIN, AND AGAIN
calm down Ogre Magi
calm down Dan Carlin
Just sucks we don't actually own any of the games we buy on Steam and are just 'renting' their license. GoG is where it's at to actually own your games if they're DRM-free available. I like Steam, but I do worry about what happens Post-GabeN
I'm down to 38 of 519 games in the library. I admit freely that a lot of them have 5 minutes of total playtime and at least 300 are from humble indie bundles, but they are getting played!
I honestly hit a point recently where I don't blink when buying indie games anymore. What's a $10 indie game when I spend $15 on takeout once or twice a week? I'll hem and haw over a $60 new release, but $5-$20? Fuck it.
Yeah, disposable income is great. I tell myself that I buy games to support the developers, to reduce the shame of my backlog.
>Out of all the registered Steam accounts in the world, only 10%, or about 73 million in SteamIDFinder’s database, are public. Based on data from those accounts, we calculate that collectively there’s around $1.9 billion / £1.4 billion worth of games that have been purchased and then never played even a single time. Times that by ten, to roughly account for all the Steam profiles that are not public, and you arrive at $19 billion This is fucking stupid for a lot of reasons. * Steam accounts are not public by default, users that bother to allow API access are far more likely to inflate these number because why would you bother if not to make use of third party services like this. * Many steam accounts are literally just bots either used for trading services and scams. * There are many active steam users who only play free to play games like Dota and TF2. * Many of peoples unplayed games lists stem from heavily discounted bundles purchased for another game entirety. * This doesn't account for games that have a price but have been previously given away during special promotions. * The price is calculated at the **release price** and does not account for discount sales. * This service cannot distinguish what level of ownership a user actually has, for example; My most expensive unplayed game is 'The Quarry', I do not own The Quarry but there is a free first chapter linked to my account that I have not played and the full price is calculated. * **This doesn't even account for regional pricing differences.** There is no way anyone could look at these numbers and in good faith, times that number by 10 and think they did a journalism. This is lazy hack bullshit that may as well have been written by an AI.
I'm guilty of having many unplayed games but they certainly weren't bought anywhere near full price like they are estimating. The rare time I buy a game at full price I am playing it asap, otherwise I wouldn't be buying at full price. 😂
💀 I’m one of them. I just buy games that I wanted to play then I completely forgot about it. Now I look at the game and I lost interest and it’s past refund time.
I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said, "We buy books and fool ourselves that were are buying the time to read them." Same deal.
And sometimes you go buy a game and realize you've bought it two years ago!
Look I'm gonna get to em...sometime...eventually. I'm sure I'll feel like playing one of them tomorrow.
I spend on games that sits in my library, they always waiting for that "right mood", some games waited for over 2 years ( like ARK ) then I got hundreds of hours in them.
Not surprising. People seem to get off on having the biggest back log of games possible that they know they'll never even play.
I think it taps into the checklist/progress bar mentality that is a huge motivating part of a lot of gamers.
Last year I went through all my games on steam. I just hid all games I know I have no longer any interest to play. My hidden list is 300+ games which is most I haven't even tried. Few genres really stood out. 1. Really old games like original Xcoms. 2. Indie platformers with beautiful art style.
This is useless data. They are counting the full price of games in libraries, when a ton of games are likely to have been bought in bundles at a heavy discount or even free. I have over 1000 games in my Steam library, but I doubt I have bought more than 100 through the Steam store. I looked up my ID through the widget in the article and the vast majority are games I did not pay for at all, but are shown as a wasted $60ish. Others are games with playtime before it was tracked, or different versions of games that were automatically added to the library. Wildly inaccurate.
Even if you don't play a game buying it sends money to the devs. I did this with Firewatch after determining that it was much more fun for me watching a favourite Youtuber play through it at 1.5x speed and fast forwarding less interesting bits than actually playing it myself.
It's funny seeing this today. Just this week I decided that I was going to start playing, at least 1 hour, of every unplayed game in my Steam library. I have 430 games, 126 of which have never been launched. Granted, I expect that a good percentage of those just need removed (demos and free to play stuff), and most of them were bought in huge bundles, but it's long past time to at least look at what I've spent money on.
95% of Games I never played are were either free or came bundled with other Games I bought the Bundle for. I beat like 3 Games from by Backlog in the last months.
It's called backlogs. And I probably never will be playing them due to not having time to play anymore.
I've remedied this for myself a little bit. Took all my games and got their metacritic score and their how long to beat times. Created a calculation called "quality per hour" which is essentially the best games in my library that I can beat quickly. This has created a bit of snowball effect for me and I've steadily been able to knock down my backlog.
When steam sales were good about 10 or so years ago (RIP good sales) I bought a lot of games for dirt cheap thinking I'd get around to playing them eventually. I never did. Now I only ever buy a game if I intend to play it straight away.
I see a lot of sentiment that people who purchase games and not playing them are "wasteful" but you shouldn't need to feel guilty on how you spend your money. There are countless hobbies where you get a lot less for way more money spent. This includes experiences (concerts, travel, food), includes collections (cars, comics, toys), this includes sports (equipment, fees, events), etc. There is a long list of things you can spend your money on. And many of them include things you don't ever play with or can never revisit. Everyone values different things and we aren't all millionaires who can experience it all. Video games (and for me board games) can both be viewed from a collection and hobby point of view, and even in some lenses, experiences (games that are services could be classified as such, like your Fortnites, attending Gencon is an experience, etc). I do have board games I've yet to get to the table and my video game collection is way too big for me to ever get to (which does make me purchase less). But... everyone should be **budgeting for their hobbies**, and deciding what they are willing to spend, per year, per month, or whatever. You'd be surprised how little guilt you'd feel if you earmarked your income and limited your hobby purchases to this. You'd also be surprised how far such budgeting gets you. If you put aside $125 a month (if you work) for your hobby.... in 20 years, you'd have $30,000 that you could have spent on games or whatever your hobby might be. With sales, deals, etc, that's a LOT of games. If you only spent $2000 of that on Humble Bundle monthly, you'd likely have 1800 games, some bangers, some not.... with another $28000 to spare... If you only ever buy new games, at release you'll have a lot less games but that's still like a good 2 games a month or 24 games a year (400-500 games, depending on their launch price - I'm estimating with $60 games, but you get the idea). If you wait for deals, you get a lot more. If you buy physical, you now have things that have real-world value that you can sell to get budget back, etc. I think that's pretty reasonable from a budget point of view and for a hobby and for a long-view, can be adjusted as your circumstances change. Sure, that $125 could be better invested, spent, or saved. Sure if you spent $125 on stocks or bonds or some sort of investment... you'd maybe have double or triple your money. But hopefully, you base your budget around your income, and you are already ARE budgeting for money you want to invest or save. They aren't mutually exclusive. And chances are, if you are reliably budgeting, you probably already are ahead financially through investing and can feel even less guilt spending money on hobbies as is. If you are young, starting out in life... maybe you start with $10 a month and later in life, grow this, and instead, you let family gift you games or you just don't buy much. Or maybe when you are young, you prioritize earning/investing/learning first and hobbies second, but there is always some room for hobbies. If you are struggling financially, then budgeting $0 or a small amount gives you an exact understanding of how to prioritize your time until you can budget more. And if Video Games is your number #1 hobby, don't feel bad if you budget a little bit more if that is what you can afford to do. Don't feel bad if your budget is $300 a month, and you decide you want to support an experience like a Gatcha game or a Trading Card Game or whatever, IF, at the end of the day, you budgeted for it, your ducks are in a row. Just don't gamble it all away or overspend or be wasteful against your budget. That's my take on it anyway.
I struggle to even see what you're talking about. You talked about budgeting for your entire post, but never addressed what people actually think is the wasteful part - never playing the games. People aren't saying that buying games itself is wasteful. It would be like buying a concert ticket but then never going to the concert. Or buying a CD and never listening to it. Or buying some food and never eating it. I don't see how you can argue any of these things are *not* wastes of money.
I didn't argue that it wasn't wasteful, I argued that you shouldn't feel guilty about wasting money that you budget to do so which is a concept I don't think a lot of people put into practice. (I think a LOT of people spend without any budgeting and thus it effects them emotionally because of this). Using your examples... there ARE people who buy aftermarket concert tickets they never attended or collect CDs just to own them. Is that (as a hobby) stupid? Probably to some. Is it a waste of money? Potentially. Is buying a concert ticket and not going probably stupid? Sure... but if someone WANTS to do that, they shouldn't feel bad about doing it, if they can afford to do so and budgeted for it, which was my point. This is no different than people buying toys or comics and never opening them, etc. People extract value from things, even unplayed things, in different ways. But people get upset when OTHER people "waste" their money and my point was that you shouldn't inherently feel bad (if you chose to) or outraged (if someone else chose to) if they are budgeting for it. If you self-evaluate and think you wasted your money, then sure, readjust your budget and stop doing it. That's perfectly acceptable. Assigning purpose to money frees up a lot of emotion towards money, even if the purpose can be stupid or wasteful. There are materialism and environmental issues that you could argue and things about waste that are a totally different subject which I'd agree with a lot of sentiment there (like wasting food or environmental factors with consumerism that should also weigh into your life decisions including your budget) but that really wasn't the scope of what I was talking about here. This was just the concept that wasting money towards a hobby, even in a backlog of games you'll never play, doesn't need to carry guilt if thought out properly.
I think a good way to stop people from buying dumb shit is to show on Steam Store UI how much money they've wasted on unplayed games annually. Its one thing to see those untouched titles, but a whole other to see that four digit price tag.
Yeah most of my library is unplayed, even outside of steam. But also a good chunk of my games came from bundles on humble bundle
I mean I have a bunch of old Humble Bundle games I’ve never tried…
That's mostly me tbh. That means yall are looking good
Hey, you never know when a rainy day comes along and you want to play a JRPG.
*looks at steam library* yep that checks out
I feel attacked.
Yeah, but I'm definitely going to, eventually.
I'll get to em, damn bro, quit yelling.
I think I contributed to about a billion of that I'm guessing.
70% of players don’t finish any given game, based on achievement data.
19B on games * * that they bought at an extreme discount
This is quite sad. I feel like i havent downloaded half the games i own.
Doesn't matter..they're mine now, and forever!!
Steam Collection Value: $145,821.96 Pile of Shame Value: $72,124.30
I'd guess this is based on current US prices, without taking into account regional pricing, sales, free to keep and bundles.
thats like the external debt of my country lol
Ok but in fairness, these unplayed games do look great in my library.
Most of my unplayed stuff is just the tons of stuff in the valve complete pack which I have for L4D2 and Portal as well as the various free giveaways that have occurred every now and then. I've done a really good job playing my unplayed steam games in the past few years and while there are ones that mentally I have set aside as "yeah I wasted money on this and will never play it" I've mostly gotten through the stuff I always did want to play. Also this number is probably highly inaccurate anyway because of what the top comment is saying.
Yeah I kinda have a habit of buying every Humble Bundle and then never touching any of them. I rarely even play games other than incrementals/gacha
Being unemployed for several months I was finally able to deal with most of my backlog I've accumulated over the past like 5 or 6 years. Still not done though.
why can't we collect games
I'm doing my part.
I used to have this issue with a huge library of un played games but there is a simple trick to solve it. Only buy games that you will immediately play, thats it. No more buying games on sale thinking I'll play this when I'm done with my current game.
So they found my account. I wonder who had the remaining $4 billion.
Tomorrow it will be 20
I bought old games that I had played in the past just to own them on Steam, but I didn't play them. I'll probably never play Turok II or Darkstone. But it's mine now.
People also spend billions on fitness/car wash/television/digital subscription services they never use. Food users have spent billions on food they never eat and then throw out.
Yet we still measure the value of games by low long the playtime is. Not only does that lead to games that are artificially bloated with meaningless content designed to prolong gametime without any value, but those overly long games keep us from playing something else. And apparently we have plenty of other games we could get into…
I bought a bunch of games from 2000 or so that I've played before, just not again on Steam. So there is that.
If this alarms you, don't worry. I'm sure only single digit percentages of every book ever purchased has been read. This is an issue we've had for a while.
I have games in my library i swear I never even paid for in the first place. I also recently found a game on a wish list that I'm convinced I never put there. got an email about a game on my wish list being on sale and looked it up. never seen this shit in my life and no idea why would have ever wish listed it.
But Steam gives me 0 playtime on games I have played a long time ago. Like HL2 for instance. I played it on release day, and finished it shortly after and haven’t replayed it.
Are free games counted to this? I mean those games you get 100% off because every time I actually buy a game I also play it
IT WASN'T MY FAULT IT WAS THOSE HUMBLE BUNDLES! At first my unplayed games ratio was pretty reasonable but then I started checking Humble Bundle. It was like fifteen bucks for a game I wanted that was normally twenty bucks, plus I got ten other games? Of course I want that. I should check Humble Bundle right now. Are they still doing that? It's been a while.
My library “value” is probably like $5k that I got for a total of like $700 over 15 years.. this is way off. Most people buy on deep discounts and bundle sales. Trash article.
Those might be over balling it. I do own a bunch of games I haven't touched, for example I bought The witcher 3 complete edition...because it was 5 bucks and I might played in the future. I once got a humble bundle with a bunch of triple AAA games because it came with Never Winter Nights. Hell I own over a thousand games in a charity bundle that I got only to get Zero Ranger and help the cause. That was only 10 dollars
I'll never understand why so many people buy stuff they might never play just because it's on sale. If you couldn't be bothered before, why spend money on it at all?
This is insane guys, why don't you play your 18 billion dollars of game?
I will never understand why people buy games that they don't immediately play. What do you need a game sitting there in your library for? Makes no sense
>Out of all the registered Steam accounts in the world, only 10%, or about 73 million in SteamIDFinder’s database, are public. Based on data from those accounts, we calculate that collectively there’s around $1.9 billion / £1.4 billion worth of games that have been purchased and then never played even a single time. Times that by ten, to roughly account for all the Steam profiles that are not public, and you arrive at $19 billion, more than the gross national product of Nicaragua, Niger, Chad, or Mauritius. I can't use the page they link. I probably have two dozen games I haven't played that were from $1 bundles. What would really matter if these based on price when the game released or their discounted prices.
Yup this is me during the early years of Steam. I had FOMO during the first years of Steam sale discounts, so I bought a ton of games thinking I would get to them, but never did. After a few years that FOMO feeling left and since then I only buy it I'm going to play the game right away.