Over 35% of all purchased games on Steam have never been played

I’m a little guilty of admitting this, but I love buying games on sale. Who doesn’t? $2.49 for a copy of Riviera: The Promised Land for my PS Vita? Sure thing! $4.99 for Batman: Arkham Asylum or Skyrim? Sign me up! Oh look! Another Humble Bundle with a few games I’ve never owned! Why not? This addiction has driven me to owning well over 300 games on my PC, and a large portion of them have not been played. Apparently, I’m not the only one either.

Right now, I can tell you that about 37 percent of the roughly 781 million games registered to various Steam accounts haven’t even been loaded a single time. I can tell you that Steam users have put an aggregate of about 3.8 billion hours into Dota 2. I can tell you that Steam users tend to put nearly 600 percent more time into the multiplayer mode on Modern Warfare 2 than the single player mode. Basically, I can give you an idea of how any of the thousands of games on Steam have performed, both in terms of sales and gameplay hours. These estimates are based on publicly available information described in much more detail below. It’s the kind of data that the public almost never gets access to in the video game industry.