Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Most people who buy games on Steam never play them

howtomarketagame.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 225 posts

Re: Most people who buy games on Steam never play them

#121

Post by ryoshu »

jonhohle wrote: post #35
marcyb5st wrote: post #4

Personally, 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.

My 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…

Same. Epic has Civ VI Platinum Edition queued...

Re: Most people who buy games on Steam never play them

#122

Post by magicalhippo »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #42
tylervigen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One stat in here supports a third, slightly different statement. The median player has not played 51% of their games, so: "most people who buy games on steam have not played most of the games they own."

Correlates with my experience. Sometimes sales are so attractive you buy several games for cheap, or even an entire franchise, but playing them all can take enough time that another sale comes again. Red Dead Redemption 2 has been collecting digital dust in my library because I'm still playing Fallout 76. I stopped buying more because it feels wrong.

I've bought entire publisher catalogs on summer/winter sales years ago. Tons of games, while I might primarily be interested in a handful. It was just cheaper to buy the whole catalog.

Re: Most people who buy games on Steam never play them

#123

Post by mlyle »

tylervigen wrote: post #31
mort96 wrote: post #14

The 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…

One stat in here supports a third, slightly different statement. The median player has not played 51% of their games, so: "most people who buy games on steam have not played most of the games they own."

There are also weird effects with family sharing. I have things in my account that my kids have played but that I haven’t.

Re: Most people who buy games on Steam never play them

#125

Post by mlyle »

AznHisoka wrote: post #47
deelowe wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

I 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?

Welcome 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).

Re: Most people who buy games on Steam never play them

#126

Post by Waterluvian »

About 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.

Re: Most people who buy games on Steam never play them

#127

Post by tgv »

mystifyingpoi wrote: post #88
whynotmaybe wrote: post #12

https://www.guitarworld.com/features/gear-acquisition-syndro... First from "guitar acquisition syndrome" can now become "game acquisition syndrome"

It is "gear acquisition syndrome". It refers to all guitar related equipment, actually I'd say that it refers to pedals much more than guitars.

Synthesizers (and related stuff, such as effects or virtual instruments) qualify too. I don't know if there are other instruments which trigger this behavior.

Re: Most people who buy games on Steam never play them

#128

Post by brandall10 »

mort96 wrote: post #14

The 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…

The article glosses over what I'd have to believe is the biggest reason - some games, in particular older AAA games, are discounted so aggressively that it seems silly to not purchase. Like 5-15% of the original retail price.

Re: Most people who buy games on Steam never play them

#129

Post by CodesInChaos »

idontwantthis wrote: post #82

Do 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.

People 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.

Re: Most people who buy games on Steam never play them

#130

Post by tgv »

I 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.
Post reply on HN