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Most people who buy games on Steam never play them
- nemomarx 1y agoI use a tracker to try and fight this, showing how many games I've started and also achievement progress in them in aggregate. But I also buy a lot of books I intend to read later, so I almost think it's inherent to digital copies? The less friction in storing them the easier it is to buy aspirationally.
- miffe 1y agoWhat tracker? I need something like this, I've around 1600 games on steam and need a way to keep track.
- nemomarx 1y agoThere are others but http://completionist.me/ http://completionist.me/ works the best for me. Shows the averages and also has things like "this many games are under 5 percent completion" so I can go find something I booted up once and forgot about. I also use steams category system to then tag some of those into a backlog category, although that doesn't help as much
- masklinn 1y ago> But I also buy a lot of books I intend to read later, so I almost think it's inherent to digital copies? Nah, it also occurs plenty with physical copies. Look up tsundoku.
- tumsfestival 1y ago>I use a tracker to try and fight this, showing how many games I've started and also achievement progress in them in aggregate. I've tried something similar before and it worked, for a while, but I started feeling the free time I spent gaming at best felt like a chore and at worst like a job. Nowadays I just play what I feel like and don't really bother much with completing games or not, because realistically I never will finish my backlog.
- nemomarx 1y agoalso very reasonable. there's no sense doing any of it unless it's enjoyable, and "getting your money's worth" out of a book or game you just aren't liking is a bad consequence of caring too much for the sunk cost and etc
- parhamn 1y agoUmberto Eco's game library.
- marcyb5st 1y agoPersonally, I have a ton of unplayed games because of Humble Bundle. Like I would buy the bundle for 1 game, and the other 9 came with it. For some of them I would redeem the coupon just in case.
- atrus 1y agoYeah, that's probably my biggest culprit too. I'm guilty of getting something and then not playing it, but I'd say over half is due to humble bundles.
- masklinn 1y agoThat and sales, especially the old ones with dailies, you'd see a game at 90% off and you'd go "uh that looks fine I can swing $2 for it" but might never actually get around to playing it.
- jonhohle 1y agoMy Thursday morning habit is to download the free games from Epic and Prime Gaming. I have hundreds of games I paid nothing for and will probably never play, but every once in a while I’ll read about an older game, find I have it in my library from one of these giveaways and can enjoy it. When I had PS+ or GamePass I did the same thing. I’ve had less success with Steam, but used to do the same thing with HB. I’m sure there are many others doing the same thing which skews the results.
- ASalazarMX 1y agoEven GoG gifts games from time to time. They're not usually amazing, so I could understand people grabbing them but never actually playing them.
- ryoshu 1y agoSame. Epic has Civ VI Platinum Edition queued...
- oefrha 1y agoSame. My library is probably >70% unplayed because of that, but in terms of money spent I’d say the number becomes <10%. And in general people are more likely to impulse buy on discount, especially deep discount. So I won’t count on making most of the revenue from unplayed sales (plus the provided stat is average 32.7% unplayed, median 51.7% unplayed, that’s not “most” anyway).
- ardit33 1y agoSo true... out of the 5 games I have bought on steam, I have played 2 (one fully), and installed and just played briefly 1, and two other never even installed.
- philipov 1y agoSurely they could have worded that better. What they mean to say is that most games that get bought don't get played.
- Yeul 1y agoGames are just like fashion!
- 28304283409234 1y agoDito with books, side projects, courses on udemy, ... It is not a game thing. It is a human thing.
- conception 1y agoThe urge to collect, it’s not our best one.
- yndoendo 1y agoSome cultures even have a word for it, like the Japanese; Tsundoku [0] Buying the tools are a step to step to fulfillment. It is easier to buy the step to fulfillment then walk the path. Then again, some books are one offs and only used for a small portion, not full consumption. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44981013 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44981013
- snarf21 1y agoYeah, the same is true for board games. The average number of times a board game is played is < 1.
- bhaney 1y agoNearly all of my "unplayed" Steam games have been played plenty by me, just not through Steam. Sometimes I think about how my Steam account contributes to statistics that are used to drive narratives like this where "not time-tracked by Steam" = "unplayed game bought by an insane collector." But chances are that narrative is overwhelmingly right most of the time, so whatever.
- throw101010 1y agoJust to clarify, I have the same usage and it's because I "pirate" games and only buy the ones that I play more than once/couple hours. I don't trust and nor like the refund policies/processes and all kinds of fences they implement, and often even after I have bought a game I will keep using the pirated version because it is more convenient (offline play, no need to login and it's already installed... when games are 100-150GB sometimes it's a waste of time to reinstall using Steam). Do you have another kind of usage that leads to these false positive?
- bhaney 1y ago> Do you have another kind of usage that leads to these false positive? No, pretty much same usage. I buy games to support the devs after I've already pirated the game and determined it's good, then I go back to playing the pirated copy.
- bee_rider 1y agoSteam’s return policy is pretty generous. But I can see not wanting to deal with it anyway.
- latexr 1y ago> I don't trust and nor like the refund policies/processes and all kinds of fences they implement Steam is pretty reasonable. If you bought a game in the past 14 days and played fewer than 2 hours, you can get a refund for any reason. You need only go to your recent purchases, “report a problem”, and with a couple of clicks you’re done. If works incredibly well and with no hassle, I have done it a number of times for games which ran like crap on my machine or plain weren’t fun. I’ve heard GOG is even better with their returns, though I have never tried it. And they sell games which are DRM-free, so even better than a pirated version.
- shmerl 1y agoI have a backlog of games, so lately I buy only if I plan to play it. I don't use bundles - that's the source of most the unplayed games.
- bigstrat2003 1y agoYeah, I used to do bundles like the Humble Indie Bundle back in the day, but most of those games just became unplayed entries in my steam library. These days I'm a lot choosier about games I buy - it has to be either a game I plan to play right away, or a game I'm certain I'm going to play later and is on sale. Otherwise, I have too many unplayed games to keep dropping money on more.
- whynotmaybe 1y agohttps://www.guitarworld.com/features/gear-acquisition-syndrome https://www.guitarworld.com/features/gear-acquisition-syndro... First from "guitar acquisition syndrome" can now become "game acquisition syndrome"
- 999900000999 1y agoVery different. With a physical item you can always sell it or give it away. Instruments in particular can hold value extremely well. Also, just having the guitar as a decoration can look nice. There's a reason most guitar manufacturers put a lot of effort into aesthetics.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mystifyingpoi 1y agoIt is "gear acquisition syndrome". It refers to all guitar related equipment, actually I'd say that it refers to pedals much more than guitars.
- tgv 1y agoSynthesizers (and related stuff, such as effects or virtual instruments) qualify too. I don't know if there are other instruments which trigger this behavior.
- whynotmaybe 1y agoMore than just instrument. GAS exists in Photography, cycling, camping, DIY, automotive repair,... It's linked to the dopamine anticipation loop that buying an item feels like you're making progress.
- tgv 1y agoI was aware of photography. But it's remarkable that guitars and synths seem to be the only two instruments. > It's linked to the dopamine anticipation loop that buying an item feels like you're making progress. I'm not fond of such explanations. The brain is so much more than dopamine. I don't think there's even a thorough explanation linking buying a guitar and dopamine, let alone one that can link it purely to dopamine. Buying is not a loop either.
- mort96 1y agoThe title is a misreading of the data. It's not that "most people who buy games on Steam never play them". It's that most games people buy remain unplayed. A tiny, tiny minority of people who buy games of Steam never play games they buy on Steam. EDIT: Apparently, this error was introduced by the HN submission! The title of the article on the website is: "Most people who buy your game won’t play it". This matches the data presented by the article.
- deelowe 1y agoI don't know why but I find language like this incredibly frustrating. Maybe it's because the media tends to do this sort of thing all the time to fit statistics to their narrative.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- AznHisoka 1y agoI think because the “true” statement is more awkward as a headline, and requires more seconds to parse. Thus they need to dumb it down. The real headline would be “Most games people buy are never played” or something. Which can mean a lot of things like do people often buy games that nobody else has ever played?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mlyle 1y agoWelcome to syntactic ambiguity. But I think this was clear enough to infer what it meant before the rephrase (aside from some edge cases like how does this play with gifts and family sharing).
- izacus 1y agoThe other thing is abuse of percentages. "Only 5% of US population has ever finished a video game." (which is a staggering 16 million people). This type of thing. Instead of focusing on folks who actually do invest time into your product, even if the % is low.
- herval 1y agoThe point is to collect games when they’re at a discount, no? At least that’s the game I play! Got 100+ at this point
- whstl 1y agoI just checked and I have 300+, yet from checking purchase history I haven't really spent that much on Steam at all. Apart from Cyberpunk I never paid much for anything. As others have mentioned, for me it's also mostly Humble Bundle promos, paying small amounts that were just donations. Maybe once or twice there was a game I wanted. I haven't opened it in 5 years though. I always toy with giving it away or deleting it.
- Sarkie 1y agoI'm buying games I will play when my kids leave home. I'm buying games that I pirated as a kid.
- Sunspark 1y agoThe longer you wait the cheaper they will be because of the age.
- mariusor 1y agoI have a ton of games that I haven't played. Mostly it's due to wanting to support the devs that pushed linux builds for their games.
- tomw1808 1y agoLike courses on udemy. Most people buy a ton of courses probably for the feeling of having bought a course. Which translates apparently to already halfway there becoming that expert the courses promises you to become. Or they build a catalog and sell the account (on udemy).
- whoisyc 1y agoI wish more game developers adopt the “no sales, period” policy of Factorio. Here’s a relevant quote from the developer. > Not having a sale ever is part of our philosophy. In short term, they are good and bring extra money, but we are targeting long term. I believe that searching for sales is wasted time, and people should decide on the price and value, but putting option of wasting time to search for deals or waiting seems like bad part of the equation. https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=159659#p159659 https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?p=159659#p159659 I get why people put games on sale. It gets you on a list on steam and gets people to talk about you on Reddit and gets emails sent to everyone who’s wishlisted your game. It boosts your profits and I get it. But let’s be honest, these techniques benefit the developer not the player. The developer profits from the players FOMO when a sale happens. The player thinks he has accumulated a glorious Steam library when in reality he just wasted tons of money on games he wouldn’t even ever launch. If any thing the domain of this website already tells you everything you need to know. It’s all about marketing, aka moving money from your pocket into theirs with psychological maneuvers.
- bombcar 1y agoThe real reason cracktorio can do no sale is the same reason Minecrack can be basically no sale (same price forever) - it’s an evergreen game people will always buy at a low roar. Most games are like DVDs or books, they frontload 90% of their total revenue in the first few months, and so sales are a way to squeeze a bit more juice out later.
- CodeArtisan 1y agoWhile the price of Minecraft stays the same, the game never stopped evolving and getting content updates. For $30 you get a much bigger game now than fifteen years ago.
- fileeditview 1y agoI don't know.. maybe if you cannot control your impulses.. For me Steam sales are great. I have things in the wish list and when the sale is good I might buy it. I always check if it's a good sale on SteamDB. I usually play these games but most of the time not for long. That's why I don't want to put in the full price.
- B1FF_PSUVM 1y ago> I too participate in video game tsundoku. SteamDB has a tool that will show you how few games in your collection you have actually played. Here is mine. 2/3rds of my games were never played. > To see your own stats go here: https://steamdb.info/calculator/ https://steamdb.info/calculator/ Ahah, piker ...
- max_ 1y agoMost books I get, I don't read
- deadbabe 1y agoIt’s still worth buying physical books that sound interesting to you even if you don’t read them, because then you can have an impressive shelf of books in your home that you might read someday, or someone else might want to read from. With these steam games? No physical copy means you’re just throwing money away.
- tbrownaw 1y agoMy library has quite a few games I haven't played, but most are from bundles that cost as much as or slightly less than the other bundle parts I actually did want. A couple are from friends posting keys from bundles, and then I got sidetracked by something before seeing if whatever game was actually as interesting as it sounded. The only one I actually properly paid for and haven't played is Elden Ring. Because I got sidetracked for too long between buying it and finding out it wanted admin access (for some anti-cheat rootkit) to play at all rather than just to enable competitive online things I wasn't interested in. Which I didn't feel like doing on a machine that also had non-game stuff on it.
- Adverblessly 1y agoI don't know if it still requires elevated privileges because I've played it on Linux, but if you used the Seamless Coop mod it disables EAC and uses the Steam API for multiplayer, so presumably won't require admin privileges. There's also er-patcher which I use to "fix" the framerate and comes with an option to disable EAC (and a few other nice features IMO).
- whatevaa 1y agoThere are mods to disable online play and anti-cheat with it.
- viccis 1y agoMan, those unopened hobby product photos just look like spending addiction. I still remember someone on r/headphones who had like 30 different AKG headphones.
- oceansky 1y agoI buy a lot of games I pirated, so it looks like I never played them.
- pembrook 1y agoThis is true for all products. How much of your closet is filled with stuff you haven’t worn in at least a year. How much of your freezer is full of stuff you’ll never eat. How many of the books on your bookshelf will you actually read before you die?
- bluescrn 1y agoPhysical books (and games) sit there on a shelf and you're occasionally remind you that you bought them and maybe should read/play them. Items in a digital library seem much easier to completely and utterly forget about.
- nlawalker 1y agoTrue, but on the flip side, items in a digital library generally don't have to be paid for and put there until you're about to use them for the first time, making it a little stranger that they never even get booted up. Everyone's different, but at least for me, I don't buy a game with the hope I'll find time to play it sometime in the next month, I buy it when I'm ready to start playing it, like right now.
- HPsquared 1y agoeBooks and audiobooks are even worse than paper books in that regard. Environmentally much better though!
- jmb99 1y agoI find for physical objects, I’m much more likely to actually use them. I have read 95+% of the physical books in my house, wear 90+% of my clothes in any given year, 95+% of the food I buy. Mainly because I’m physically limited to buying/owning a certain number of things before I run out of space. With a 150TB NAS and at least 4TB of local storage in each of my PCs (and the fact you don’t even need to download a game to buy it), it’s a lot easier to hoard digital items without using them.
- aaronbaugher 1y agoI'll bet kitchen tools are big on this. How many people buy a specialized appliance like a bread maker and then use it once or never at all? If you don't use something regularly, it's easy for it to end up tucked away in a cabinet where you never think of it again.
- homarp 1y agoit's an antilibrary https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilibrary/ https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antili... I buy games I might play, my kids might play. And sometimes to repay my younger self debt.
- ryangrange 1y agoI buy lots of potentially interesting games when they go on sale. Especially single player (or at least with a single player option) so I don't have to worry about servers sitting down for a lack of players.
- dathinab 1y agoI won't say it's not hording, but there are also some other reasons you can't well untangle from hording: - buying games you played pirated before (now that you can afford them), but you already played them so no need to play again - buying games you played at someone else place, lend to you etc. Again you already played them but want to give back to the authors. - buying games you will play later, and once you play them you have new games which you will played later -- leading to some constant amount of unplayed games (and some you end up never playing 'cause time) - early access titles you already bought but will most likely only play on release - buying very story driven games (mainly short indi games) where through watching someone else play you already now (and enjoyed) all the story but want to give bac to the authors anyway ("someone else" could be twitch, or you room mate, doesn't matter) I have a few of this cases in my Steam library. E.g. Little Misfortune for the last case or Hades 2 for the early access part or Dave the Diver for the I will definitely still play it part (very soon TM, jokes aside probably starting Wednesday). Also one point I didn't include as it's kinda hording: Game bundles where you want all games but one, think the last game is still nice but anyway will never play it as there are too many other even better games.
- heelix 1y agoI've got games that I intend to play later, and they were cheap enough that I don't think I'll save any more by waiting. I do intend to play Mad Max at some point - $5 was too much for me to add it to my library. $2.50? Fine... pulled the trigger with 9 other items I plan to do. The thing with steam is once you have them in your library, they remain. Some items are not sold anymore, however. Looking at my queue over 20 years... likely hording. Nuts. One of the gotchas I bumped into was I really need a larger disk for games. Some of the newer stuff takes an enormous amount of space, which means it waits and waits.
- yreg 1y ago- buying a bundle of 12 games to get the two games you actually want to play - donating to a charity event that gives you games
- omnimus 1y ago
- TheChaplain 1y agoI am somewhat guilty, but I bought a number of Humble Bundle's (when it was the original one) and got a huge number of games I am not interested in. So I guess I fit in but still not?
- D13Fd 1y agoI have a huge backlog of games I’ve bought on sale knowing I would enjoy them, but never got around to playing them. It’s well over 50% of my game library. The problem for me is that a good game that you really like can easily eat multiple thousands of hours. It’s just a time consuming hobby. And it takes a lot of effort to get started on a new game. I can’t help but think “wouldn’t I rather spend that time improving my ranking in x or y game…”
- luxuryballs 1y agoI think this is the real reason for the metric, browsing steams sales and scooping deals for later, I wonder what the numbers would be if they compared playtime with full price purchase or purchase made not during major store-wide sales.
- qnleigh 1y agoLiterally thousands?? A 40-hour work week for a year is ~2000 hours. Out of curiosity, what's your rough 'playing schedule'?
- D13Fd 1y agoI’ll put 3-4 hours into gaming from around 8:30-12:30 pm after the kids go to bed. It takes the place of most TV, movies, or social media for me. On the weekends it can be a bit more. I also do competitive gaming and during the comp seasons I have some later nights. That has been my schedule since 2008 or so, and it adds up (or so my Steam numbers tell me).
- idontwantthis 1y agoDo many more Americans than I realized pay for unlimited data caps? I try to restrict myself to 1 download per month with a family of 3 because we get pretty close to our TB cap each month and I work from home.
- CodesInChaos 1y agoPeople who buy a game and don't play it, usually don't download it either. And many cheap games don't have huge downloads either.
- mhlakhani 1y agoThis was me for a long time and it got even worse especially with Humble Bundles — I often ended up buying games on say PS5 though I had them on steam. Ended up building a side project for myself which would yell at me for trying to buy something I already had. But that’s ok, sometimes the collection is half the fun
- SubiculumCode 1y agoTrue for board games, ttrpg books and games, and a whole lot more. We have an abundance of cool things, but not an abundance of time and opportunities.
- bhattisatish 1y agoTaking a segue, I am a 50+ man who hasn't played any games in my working life. I did play Prince of Persia 2 but never crossed level 1. Played Doom in the network mode with classmates. Now I want to start exploring games. I am on Ubuntu with Intel graphics. I am ready to invest in a joystick or gamepad. What games do you guys recommend to me? Also any hardware accessories, other than GPU's, that is? I just tried Steam, and was completely overwhelmed by choice.
- qudat 1y agoHands down one of the best games I have ever played was Subnautica and I highly recommend it without knowing your preferences. It’s a deep sea exploration / builder with a story that gets crazier and crazier. It’s also very approachable and mostly easy to play.
- unsui 1y agoSubnautica in VR (with the Submersed VR mod) is easily the most immersive environment I have ever encountered.
- bhattisatish 1y agoThanks. Looks interesting... Will definitely try this one
- brianjlogan 1y agoI wouldn't buy a joystick if you're into Flight sims. I'd look into a Hotas setup or a virtual reality setup where the whole cockpit is simulated (VTOL VR). I started out on Microsoft Flight Simulator back in 99-2000. I feel like that was the peak joystick purchase era. Get a monitor with a good refresh rate, get a good gaming keyboard and mouse, potentially look into mechanical keyboards if you watch some videos and find it interesting. Watch some YouTube PC gaming channels. Also there's SO many games you're right it is overwhelming. You could easily go ten years back. And buy the top ten games on some gaming site rank list. Obligatory mentions: - Red Dead Redemption 2 - The Last of Us - BioShock Infinite - The Witcher 3 - City Skylines (Sims City like) Really depends on what category of game you like. Highly highly subjective thing these days. You can almost make friends by aligning on the types of games you like because it's a bit of a personality litmus test. I'd imagine a lot of people in HackerNews play Factorio quite seriously.
- teaearlgraycold 1y agoSteam games are the original NFTs. You buy them to look at the cover art in your Steam library.
- vardump 1y agoI have probably 1000 games in my Steam library. Played maybe 50 of those if that. Why? Earlier Humble Bundle subscription... And in addition I've bought so many bundles separately I've never played.
- Waterluvian 1y agoAbout 15 or so years ago a roomate and I recognized this issue and created a simple solution that worked for us. A Google sheet where we would list games we completed and give them 5, 10, or 15 points subjectively based on the size of the game. At the end of a school term whoever got the most points would pick a dinner (take-out, dine-in, etc.) and the other would pay. For us that's all it took to break out of the habit of playing the same 2 games all the time. I'm sure many of you are being fastidious engineers and immediately thinking about all the failure modes. But that's the delight in something so simple: we didn't have to worry about everyone else's failure modes.
- tgv 1y agoI know some people with a huge library, practically everything free. They are into game design, so in their case it's more meta than playing. Given that there are hundreds of thousands of (wannabe/student/amateur/pro) game designers and programmers, I wouldn't be surprised if there are many people with similar libraries.
- macjohnmcc 1y agoI buy some just to support the developer if they are small.
- pradn 1y agoI’ve bought a bunch of games just to support the creators, to vote with my dollar and say: I want more of this. Dwarf Fortress comes to mind as an example. I’ve got to sit down and learn to play it. Will probably take a week!
- qnleigh 1y agoThis makes me wonder how much consumer spending as a whole is on products that people never use. It's not like this psychology is unique to gaming. Could it be as high as 50%?
- ta8645 1y agoMany people buy a lot of games just to give them away on steamgifts.com. I used to be heavily involved over there, giving away many thousands of game copies, and ended up with over 4,800 games in my own Steam library, and I still haven't played more than 200. I don't think I have enough days left in my life to ever play them all.
- gessha 1y agoOne tactic I’ve developed for myself is I select 1, maximum 2 games I want to play from my wishlist and I get those during seasonal sale. I don’t purchase other games until the next sale unless it’s to play with my friends.
- esafak 1y agoMaybe it's a good thing; they might be doing more productive things!
- Qem 1y agoWhen I graduated and got a job, one of my first aquisitions was a new game console and several titles. It sat mostly idle, because despite earning the money to afford it, now I lacked the free time. After a couple of years gathering dust I gifted it to my younger cousin.
- jader201 1y agoMaybe I’m not the crowd this article is referring to, but for the most part, I wishlist games I’m interested in, then buy them on sale. As a result, I’ve played most of the games in my library. Having said that, there are still games I haven’t played, but these are older titles when I used to follow Steam on Twitter, and would grab random games on sale. Since moving to only buying wishlisted games (I no longer follow any other feeds of sales), I’ll only buy games I’m already interested in.
- Aeolun 1y agoI will buy games purely because I want them continue to be made. There’s developers that released a game I liked 10 years ago that I still buy all the games of just on the off chance the next one will be equally loved by me. Conversely, there’s publishers that I avoid like the plague. Nothing Ubisoft or Electronic Art will ever see my disk any more.
- LatteLazy 1y agoSome games I play for an hour but never return to. Some games I have 1000s of hours on. Whether a given game will be the former or the latter is hard to tell. Given these facts it makes sense to buy a lot of games knowing I will only play a few regularly.
- abotsis 1y agoI’ll often buy a game (esp an Indie game) and just not have time to play it. I don’t have a ton of free time, so if a game doesn’t immediately draw me in and keep my attention, I don’t play it. I think that’s pretty common. I’ll also buy games on a whim and never get much past the title screen. I have more money than time these days. But when I was younger I had more time than money. So I’d pirate games. This is kind of my way of atoning.
- kaycey2022 1y agoI just realised I bought expedition 33 and still haven’t played it. :(
- chickenzzzzu 1y agoIt turns out that gamers, despite being the people who fund my existence, are not fully rational actors, unless we consider some externality like they are buying games for the mental satisfaction of collecting or something.
- nottorp 1y agoWhy just Steam? I buy my ps5 games on disc. Most of them I treat the same as Steam. I wishlist them and occasionally do a round of checking which ones have cheapened enough to get. That because physical cheapens faster than digital on console, and you also retain long term access no matter what Sony may decide next year. And yes, I have a few never opened console discs as well. They definitely weren't full price...
- hugh1st 1y ago[dead]
- dgellow 1y agoI like to curate and grow my collection over time. I’m fine not playing 80% of games I buy on steam