Players aren’t exactly thrilled about new games. Most of the overall time spent by users on Steam has been devoted to games created in the last seven years, many even older.
Steam players spent only 15% of their total gaming time on 2024 titles. 47% of the time was spent on games released between one to seven years ago. A whopping 37% of the time players spent in games that came out eight years ago or more.
Actually, 15% is a significant increase compared to 9% of time on new games released last year—but it’s less than the 17% of time spent on new games in 2022. Likely, a considerable role in this year’s relative recovery is played by games like Helldivers 2 and Black Myth: Wukong, which leads in terms of concurrent players. Also, a lot of time for new games was brought in by… the Banana clicker.
Most massive online game services aren’t new, and this leads to relatively little time players spend in “fresh” games. Perennially at the top of Steam are Counter-Strike, Dota 2, and PUBG. As evidenced by the cancellation of Concord after a failed start, and the shutdown of XDefiant, creating a competitive game in this market is tough. However, the popularity of new games like Marvel Rivals and Path of Exile 2 give hope.
Overall, there are now over 200,000 games on Steam created more than 10 years ago. This is a massive number compared to 18,000 released in 2024. Players on Steam are primarily PC gamers, among whom are all age groups. Older people are more prone to nostalgia: the favorite games of this news article’s author, which periodically prompt a desire to play, were created many years ago, although the same desire is evoked by some games from this and last year. 15% on Steam isn’t evidence of some decline of new games, but rather an objective and even decent “snapshot.”
Source: PC Gamer
Spelling error report
The following text will be sent to our editors: