The Gaming Trends on Steam in term of Total Playtime
Steam is currently the biggest game digital distributor in the world with 30,000 available game titles and 90 million active users in 2020.
As a game enthusiast who spends most of my gaming time playing games on Steam and as a new data science student, I would love to apply my growing skill in data science to explore the gaming trends on the platform.
The dataset I used for this analysis was Steam Store Games, which contains the statistics of over 25,000 games on Steam Store gathered from Steam Store and Steamspy APIs. These statistics include basic information about the games (name, descriptions, required specs,…) and about the users (estimated number of owners, average playtime,…).
The most interesting facts about gaming trends on Steam appeared when I analyzed the total playtime estimation of each game. The detailed notebooks and graphs are available on my Github repos.
Now, let’s take a look at these results.
Which games are most popular?
This is the first question that popped up in my mind was what were the most popular games on the platform. We can easily figure this out just by sorting the estimated number of owners of each game.
We can see that Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS are the top 3 most popular games on Steam.
However, this does not show us the true magnitude of these games. To observe the dominance of these games, we have to take a look at the estimated total playtime.
These three games alone take up to 60% of the total playtime on the entire platform. Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive developed by Valve, the same corporation that developed Steam, take nearly half of the total playtime. Dota 2 alone has between 2 and 5 TRILLION minutes in total, which is equivalent to between 4 and 10 million years of playtime.
Again, the detailed code and figures are available on my Github repos.
So what about other games?
Ok, now we know that more than half of the total time spent on Steam was dedicated to only three games, so what about the other 30,000 games? Personally, I played a lot of other games on Steam. What are the trends of those games?
Let’s remove these three games out of the dataset and take a closer look at the popular game genres of the remaining games.
In the last few years, we’ve seen the rise in popularity of indie games. Because of their relatively simple designs and gameplay, indie games can be developed by single developers or small studios. Indie has become most populous on Steam but have yet to take over the popularity of action games.
Massively multiplayer genre lives up to its name. Despite having under 500 titles, this genre takes up to 1 trillion minutes of gameplay.
One-time purchases, in-app purchases or both?
Finally, we have known the most popular games and the most popular genres. The last thing I would like to check out is their business.
Games can profit by selling copies of their games (one-time purchases), some examples are Witcher 3, Darksoul III. Other games are free to play but offered in-app purchases (Dota 2 for instance). Games like PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUND do both.
So which of these business models is the most attractive to players?
These graphs clearly show the domination of free-to-play games with in-app purchases. With only under 500 games in total, this business model takes more than half of the total playtime on Steam.
In conclusion, in this post, we have seen the popularity of action games, the variety of indies, and the domination of Dota 2 and the free-to-play with in-app purchases model in terms of playtime.
