Steam Users Spent Surprisingly Little Time Playing New Games in 2024

Steam users spent far less time playing brand new games than one might expect, with only 15% of global play dedicated to new titles. Steam has now revealed its end-of-year stats for players and on a global scale, and it’s revealed this tidbit, plus some other interesting details regarding what players choose to play on the game platform.

While it’s not the only one, Steam is the most popular PC gaming platform and the longest-lived. Its massive game catalog gives players plenty of new favorites to discover, which includes a sizable back catalog. While Steam gamers often joke that they don’t play most of their games before buying new ones, it seems older titles were far more popular this year than new ones.

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The 2024 Steam Replay is now available, which breaks down individual users’ statistics on the platform, showing them the titles and genres they spent the most time on, as well as other details. On the global side, Steam revealed that only 15% of the time spent playing on the service was dedicated to 2024 games. However, that doesn’t mean that everyone was catching up on 2023 hits, as only 47% of the time spent playing was on games that released in the last one to seven years. The other 37% of playtime was dedicated to games eight years of age or older.

Comparing Annual Steam Statistics

While 15% might seem incredibly low, Steam has actually seen an increase of playtime dedicated to new games in comparison to 2023. In 2023, players were overwhelming dedicated to old games, with a mere 9% of playtime spent on 2023 games, 52% on titles under eight years old, and just 38% on games older than that. However, 2024 just narrowly missed 2022’s record, which saw 17% of time spent on games released in 2022, a mere 19% on games between one to seven years old, and a staggering 64% of time playing games that were at least eight years old.

2024 had plenty of standout PC hits, so it’s not as though players were hurting for new games to enjoy. However, as mentioned, Steam has a huge catalog of games to peruse, and its regular game sales help to give older titles a boost by promoting their discounts during that period. While new games come out every year, it seems there simply aren’t enough of them to make a meaningful dent when there are hundreds of games that have come out in this decade and far more that have emerged over the last 25+ years.

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Steam

Steam is a digital video game storefront and program developed by Valve that allows gamers to purchase, play, and mod their titles all through one convenient program.

Brand

Valve

Original Release Date

September 12, 2003

Original MSRP (USD)

N/A

Weight

N/A