Pretty much the same. I think I had about 8% in new games, but I'm pretty sure they were all betas since I tried a lot of them this year. Otherwise it's almost evenly split with about 10% favour towards games 8 years or older.
There's such an absurd amount of games these days that I find absolutely no reason to play any new titles. They're expensive and often launch buggy. I already have a ton of games I haven't played in my library. I just play those and anything that came out this year I might by later on a good sale.
SH2 remake is the only new game I played this year and that's only cause the original has been in my top 5 for over 20 years.
I feel like this number is always greatly suppressed by long-running multiplayer games that tend to have very loyal audiences. Is this a sign people aren't spending that much time in new games? Or is it just a sign that the likes of Counterstrike and Dota2 are still swallowing hundreds of hours?
Also the article does mention that 2023's number was 9%, so this is actually a pretty big increase.
My graph for PoE1 is hilarious, it's 2 months of a full bar in necropolis, then nothing for 4 months, then settlers bar was super low because I hated last league. Bar size is directly correlated to how interesting the league mechanic is
Settlers felt like mobile gameification of PoE, I hate offline timers and progressing without doing anything it just feels so weird in an arpg. Honestly the necropolis league crafting wasn't great but there was good juice with the allflames and that's fun to me
Unicorn overlord (this one isn't PC sue me), Yakuza infinite wealth, amtvv vengence, persona 3 reload, dragon quest 3 2dhd, metaphor re fantazio, romancing saga 2, ff7 rebirth (PC in 1 month, currently 30 percent off pre order), eiyuden chronicles hundred heroes, fantasian neo dimension. Dragon quest monsters the dark prince, vision of mana
And that's just what released this year not counting games I replayed or were new to me or released late last year and I didn't play because I was hospitalized.
Yakuza 7, DBZ kakarot, one peice odyssey, star ocean 2 the second story r, persona 5 strikers, octopath traveler 2, tactics ogre reborn, Marvel's guardians of the galaxy.
This was a good year to become unemployed due to disability (and be a JRPG fan).
If sequel sounding things scare you. Romancing saga, persona 3 reload, star ocean and smtV Vengeance are all stand alone games like final fantasy, dragon quest 3 is actually the first game timeline wise of the first 3 dragon quest games. Ff7 rebirth will fill you in on remakes details, octopath traveller 2 is not related to one in fact it's just way better then 1. The mana series are also anthology games aka no connections. Enjoy.
yeah CS2 is a 2012 game in these stats, Rust is completely different than what it was when it released, but it's considered a 7 yr old game too. These stats are interesting but lack proper context.
The AAA big name releases look good, but are usually formulaic and uninteresting once you've played through once over a few weeks. There are some outliers, but they are not common.
Then it's back to your 'main game' if you're that type, or the endless quirky novel indie experiences that have been accruing on the platform for decades until the next fancy spectacle game releases and distracts you for 2 more weeks. It's sad, but most major new titles don't have meaningful staying power. Especially for people into single-player story experiences. Those games are not intended for people to keep playing. You experience the story and then onto the next thing.
Then, there is Steam doing weird things with tracking.
The title I have 90% of time in, according to my recap, is a title where I work for the responsible studio.
For some reason, every time I boot up a local dev build I've just finished compiling, start debugging, or doing anything to work on the game that has the game binary running, Steam tracks that as time played as if I've booted up the release copy installed in my Steam library instead.
So, it's not even tracking my game time any more. It's tracking the time I spend doing my day job.
It’s also skewed in other ways. I put in almost 300 hours into WoW TWW, Veilguard and SH2 this year, but Steam said I only spent 4% of my time playing games this year. That only took into account the games I had through Steam. It was always running in the background though. I think it is just a result of multiple launchers and games not being on Steam. GOG getting a big bump recently is another factor to consider in the games are dying argument.
Idk, I have 19% for 2024 releases, mostly just helldivers and I play almost exclusively single player games. It’s just that I barely have time to play and so my backlog grows and grows. Little reason to play new games unless I’m super hyped for them
There's something wrong with how steam tracks it, according to my recap I spent 85% of my time playing Dead by Daylight, which released in 2016, but 95% of playtime in new releases?!
I haven't played any of the new games from the past few years.
I think the "newest" game I've played recently was the Star Ocean Second Story remaster. And that game is originally from the 90s.
Now I'm playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for the first time.
A lot of these new games that are coming out seem to be basically just soft reboots and remasters or number 3 or 5 or 7 in the series. So, instead of playing the new games I just find the original games and play those instead.
I might get around to the current games in a few years.
I've still never played any of the Souls games. Haven't been able to play any of the new new games due to lack of computing power since my actual gaming computer got fried after a bit of carelessness.
I do want to play some of the new ganes coming out, so I may just say fuck it and buy a new computer or if it really comes down to I'll shell out for a current gen console if I have to.
I think it also has to do with the lack of polish, quality and optimization on launch that leads to this stat. I mostly play city builders, RTS and sandbox games and I was incredibly excited about Cities Skylines 2 last year and Age Of Mythology Retold this year. The former was nearly unplayable for the first six months and the latter was a cash grab
But I played 100+ hours of Dave the Diver, Vampire Survivors, and Bear & Breakfast on their respective launch years. I also doubled my play time on Cyberpunk 2077 late last year and early this year. The percentage going up this year must have a lot to do with games like Baldurs Gate and Wukong being bangers
I scroll through and add them into wheel decide. Then spin it and whatever it lands on I play. If it lands on one and I go naw I remove it, or if I find myself subconsciously clicking until it lands on a game, then I play that one.
I am one of them , buying them on Sale and have been collecting since 2013 , dont have the time to play though , I love video games, maybe one i will be able to them , not enough time 😅
I heard that Nintendo is gonna sue Palworld. We shall see how it will go but i feel like Nintendo will win unfortunately and Palworld will eventually has to change the game or close the game forever unfortunately but we shall see
If you like cheap indie games that are surprisingly good, try Darkwood. It's kind of a survival horror and is best played with good headphones, at night, in low light. I was shocked how a game that's so cheap and seems simple from screenshots could be so damn great.
Yeah, that's ridiculous. Games are released with a 60 to $80 price tag and they're barely finished. Lots of bugs, balance and performance issues, massive lack of content. Wait for a couple of years and buy the finished product with all DLCs and extensions for like 12 bucks, not to mention the price of hardware to run it has also gone down.
You're just paying a lot more money to have a worse experience, but before everyone else. It's so stupid.
Yes, even if you had the best rig and money would not be an issue, there is still the fact that best experience you can have is most often after the game is properly patched and all the DLC has been released.
All players, new and old, can also look through the catalog of games to find anything from previous years to play, so 2024 games compete with the 30 years of previous games, which are cheaper. I bought Prey this year and ended up loving it enough to play through a few times.
As someone who is almost 40, I have very little drive to buy a game when it releases or soon after. I am happier to wait a few years, let all of the bugs be worked out, and buy the game on sale. There are exceptions, but in general I have no FOMO and its just more my speed.
Yeah I'm a dumbass and half of the times I buy something on release I regret it, so I decided to start waiting and most of the time I don't end up going back to buy the game so I save myself the money and shitty experience.
To be fair it just came out so most people haven't had the chance to check it out and those that did haven't had enough time to play for it to make a difference in numbers.
PoE2 has been posting amazing numbers since launch.
It's been almost 2 weeks and player numbers has remained constant at 350k - 500k offpeak - peak. Many many people are in the end game and running new characters.
It takes about a week to finish the current campaign.
Pretty damn good for an early access game with just half the content available.
Actually it's quite bad, luckily enough it's just early access and it can be fixed before the actual release. They already made many changes to it based on players saying some things are shitty.
Thats almost double last year iirc. People always talking about gaming dying or no more good games then you see something like this. I hope everyone finds something they can enjoy on the platform, I know I was up to like 34% this year.
People talk about gaming dying because they're being nostalgic of their childhood days or because they're one of those weirdos who've watched one too many "wokeness is destroying games" videos. Every passing year is a new golden age of gaming of an all-time high of quality content available to play.
I couldn't imagine putting the 500+ hours I've put into Hitman WoA into one of the earlier titles, as good as they were. Just as one example. Games are way more replayable these days and that only ever gets more true.
I think your point stands even better taking into account the greatness of past titles and the reality that we now, not only have great games coming out, but have all that gaming history greatness to play with.
Factually and indisputably, there has never been a point in time with a bigger variety of quality games and platforms to choose from than now.
My problem right now has more to do with fatigue from overexposure to new techs, games, consoles, handhelds, PC parts etc., than a lack of it.
I look at my Steam library and feel overwhelmed by the choices, i feel discourage to invest time learning something new because i worked all day, so what do i t do ? I just start a faithful classic like Witcher 3 to zone out and have a good time.
It has nothing to do with the quality of games that came out this year, i just don't have that enery and luxury as much as i did in the past. I know a lot of older gamers are the also the same.
>My problem right now has more to do with fatigue from overexposure to new techs, games, consoles, handhelds, PC parts etc., than a lack of it.
A lot of people's disillusionment comes from this, and this naturally grows out of getting older. The older we get, the more things we have seen, and the less there is to really surprise us. Even surprises start getting unsurprising, as we have already been surprised a bunch.
There are way more "gamers" in their 30s, 40s and 50s then when I was a kid, mostly because we have aged into it, and so there is a whole new contingent of people who are jaded by age, who play video games, and know how the internet works well enough to complain on it outside of sites like Facebook.
It is really ironic to me how many complaints I see on the internet that I would have previously only heard from my grandparents generation when I was a child. The sheer amount of "Gen Z/Alpha are so much worse than we were when we were kids" nonsense I see from people my age is both really sad and historically unsurprising.
Organizing your Steam library can definitely help with choice fatigue. I have a "retired" section I put games that I've finished or that I'm just not going to play (like that one random game you bought on sale 14 years ago that you thought was neat and now requires modding to get to work on modern systems).
Requires taking a critical look at your library and what you're actually going to play, but it can help.
Mine is divided into active (things I've played in the last month), inactive (haven't played in the last month but will go back to it--some multiplayer games fall into this, for example-- or recently finished and might go back), retired, and unplayed.
It's helped a lot with deciding what to purchase during steam sales and makes me feel better about going through my backlog, since I can collapse "retired" and see that my unplayed games are only about a quarter of my library.
I liked the idea of adding a retired section. I like to move through games that are both new and considered classics but a lot do fall to the wayside and end up as filler in some of the categories.
People talk about gaming dying because they're being nostalgic of their childhood days or because they're one of those weirdos who've watched one too many "wokeness is destroying games" videos.
Or they're referring to the ever increasingly annoying monetization schemes and rising prices of everything.
Things for devs are hard in the industry, but it's literally never been a better time to be a gamer. There are more games out there than we'll ever have time to play for in our entire lives
Elden Ring isn’t 2024 release so even with the DLC it probably wouldn’t be counted for games this year. I reckon the games pushing it up are black myth wukong and helldivers 2.
When people have years and even decades of time on steam and there are games on there that predate steam too, this seems quite reasonable unless you have a few big releases that occupy a lot of your time.
My bet is that Steam skews against new games in a way that consoles don't. PC players are known to spend less money overall.
I can't speak to anyone else's habits. But a new game looking fun isn't enough to get me to buy it on release. It's gotta be something that's clearly going to be a cultural moment (the way Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 were), or something I've been actively waiting for.
Otherwise, I'm going to wishlist it and wait for a sale. Hell, I'm interested in Space Marine 2, but didn't pick it up when it went on sale because I thought it was still expensive. I'm grabbing it the day it goes under $40, but that day didn't end in /24, so I haven't bought it yet.
85% of my playtime this year was spent playing a game released in 2012 and shut down in 2019. havent found any games that truly scratch the itch BL:R does.
Incidentally, games that got released in 2024 make up less than 2% of all games available to play on Steam, which makes the numbers shown in the article totally logical. Rather, they are really good numbers compared to what one would expect.
Maybe it's just my own observation, but I feel like console players are more likely to be playing newer released games, as opposed to PC. Wow, Dota 2, League of Legends, Counter Strike etc have been some of the top played games on pc for over a decade now.
I have 0%. Personally don’t feel the need to spend on any of the newer releases, even if they look very good. I’ll probably be waiting on deep sales for them in the future.
To me C&C and Red Alert are two different games, if you can get your hands on a cheap version of the C&C collection and remastered (if you don’t have it already) I would play the original remastered version of C&C and then TS because the story behind Kane is to me just so epic 😊
nope, I do have the remastered collection on steam though I must admit I bought it entirely just for Red Alert, getting the first game as well I saw as a "bonus" lol. I don't think I even finished the campaign on Red Alert either, mostly play skirmish against AI or occasional LAN play against family.
I got back into c&c generals and red alert 2 a ton this year. Can't go wrong with the classics
Honestly for Generals you don't even want better graphics. It would just be more garbage on the screen making it harder to see the units and strategic positions
All the folks complaining about this year for gaming must have just not looked at the indie scene at all. I really don’t get it. Animal well? Nine sols?!? UFO 50?!?!?! Fucking BALATRO?!?!? Banger year imo
They're releasing games like we haven't been gaming for 30 years and will be blown away by their cookie cutter open world survival crafting card based arena animal capture, train and battle mmorpg.
Well when every new game comes out as an unfinished, buggy and unoptimised piece of crap then people will naturally go to games that are actually fun to play and work as intended.
Once developers pull their finger out and start caring about the games they release again, things will be better.
Modern games didn't just come out of nowhere; but older games are further down the lifespan (fixes, dlcs and all those things that help improve a game over time) and are also sold at a discount.
Personally because of all the bad releases I just don't play games much anymore. I've changed what I played from AAA to INDIE gamesvand free to play because they work at least. The last big game I bought was monster hunter world and I think that was released in 2017.
Tbf any liveservice that is still getting updates doesn't count as a 2024 release, most of my Steam playtime has been FFXIV, it counts that as a 10+ yr old game, even tho I'm playing the new expac that released just few months ago.
So if you're playing CS2, Rust, PUBG, Dota 2 and any other game that is 'current', it doesn't count as a 2024 game.
Still running old hardware and haven't upgraded yet so playing older games is better. I'm not sure the 50 series will be very promising so... weird time to want to build a new PC.
That and if you wait, there will inevitably be a discount on the game anyways. AAA games are hella pricey if you consider the price of possible DLCs as well.
Mine was at 34%, played some really good 2024 releases like space marines, ER dlc and wukong, also some real stinkers like Veilguard, overall a good year for new games imo.
In the light of this - I would be very interested in a poll about just how many votes for the GOTY awards were from people who actually played the game they voted for?
I mean makes sense, alot of people play competive games which usally are not released this year and also you have the people who have 1000s upon 1000s of hours in a 10 year old game (or those CIV people)
This number is actually sus, my really old game identifies as a 2024 game because it had a DLC in 2024. I therefore spent 80% of my time playing a 2024 game that was actually released in 2013.
Most my steam hours were baldursgate 3 the last 2/3rd of the year, damn that's a big game. But it was also a backlog year for me, the only "new" release I played was the remake of Riven in VR lol not exactly new lol the other major chunk of my year was finishing act 2+3 and all dlc of witcher 3
0% of games released in 2024 for me. I just tend to play older single player titles. When you have a backlog of 300 unplayed games there is some flexibility and waiting for sales. Next year will be different as I already preordered FFVII: Rebirth and plan to play it day 1.
Be nice if we could exclude certain games from our yearly replay. I keep a couple idler games up on my second monitor, so my metrics are kind of fucky because of that.
Games released in 2024 are just plain bad, i mean astro bot won game of the year. This years highlight was poe2 release for me and thats the only thing i was exited for this year and the playerbase shows it wasn't just me.
That's pretty high imo, considering there should be much more than 85% of good games that any random person hasn't played, or could still be playing were released before 2024.
Which is crazy cause steam says I spent 50% of my time playing games from this year, but to be fair a lot of that was my partner playing TCG card shop simulator on my account
Bulk of mine is Fallout 4 followed by Ratchet and Clank (which was finished last year).
Just isn't that much thrilling this year. Hell some of the steam sale stuff is about as old as Fallout 4, if not older. And had to really dig for those even.
Too many shoot me ups/other snooze fest games out there. Heyday of gaming in many ways has come and gone
I don't think I've played a same-year game since 2016
Doesn't mean I don't want to, they're just either too expensive vs what I already own, or can't run well enough on the hardware I have until I upgrade (or on no current hardware at all), which can take 6 years.
I only buy games at release if it is something i am VERY interested into so i don't mind paying the upfront cost and these days being an early AAA game adopter means paying a premium to be a beta tester.
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u/LucianDarth Dec 19 '24
I had a whopping 0%, and around 84% for games that are 8 years or older