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mcforest @feddit.org

Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases

Patient gamers might be interested in this news.

127 comments

  • Fascinatingly, this number can't even include Fortnite, since it's not on Steam, and has got to be the elephant in the room in terms of play time going to older games. But that is something to keep in mind when you see stats like this. It's not all "New releases failing." A lot of it is "Games have a much longer lifespan now."

    Numbers wise, my top 3 were Helldivers 2, Warframe, and Vampire Survivors, all of which continued to receive content updates throughout 2025. These aren't old games sitting on a shelf gathering dust that I went and unearthed. They're in their prime. Warframe released a huge update specifically to coincide with the Game Awards, with a trailer featuring Werner Herzog. They've never been a bigger deal. Helldivers had their single biggest in-game event this year. I've also been spending a lot of time with Rogue Trader (just got a big patch) and Dark Tide (got two new classes and a lot of new maps added this year). Ready or Not and Insurgency also got content updates this year.

    So, yeah, peeling people away from an existing title is a much slower process now. Games no longer land like a meteor. The real successes creep up.

    This is not to say that there hasn't been an absolute dearth of worthwhile content from the big studios. You'll notice that every single thing I listed there is, by at least some definition, an indie game. Helldivers 2 has a big publisher in Sony, but Arrowhead were hardly a major or well known developer. Other than that, it's all outside of the traditional publisher system. And that's frankly a good and healthy thing. We're seeing guys like Larian and Sandfall, Arrowhead, DE, Owlcat, Fat Shark, NetEase, Team Cherry, Super Giant, all just absolutely crushing it, and that's genuinely fantastic news for the medium.

    It's weird how people look at the failures of Ubisoft and EA and act like this is a bad time to be a gamer. This is one of the best times there's ever been to be a gamer. The medium hasn't been this healthy since the glory days of the mid-nineties, and I say that as one of the old farts who grew up in those glory days. Sandfall made Clair Obscur with a team of 60, and it's incredible. Owlcat made Rogue Trader for basically nothing in a shed and it's one of the best RPGs you'll ever play. Vampire Survivors had a budget of like three french fries and some pocket lint and it's one of the most addictive gaming experiences ever. Balatro was like one guy and it absolutely blew up the world. The fact that we're getting games this fucking good from outside of the big name publishers is genuinely amazing. I remember the mid 2000s when indie gaming was dead in a ditch, PC gaming was just nothing but console ports, and the only stuff we got was the endless drivel the major publishers shovelled out. Yeah, there were good releases sprinkled in there, but for the most part creativity and imagination were absolutely dead. Now we get stuff like Valheim, Stardew Valley, Project Zomboid, Space Marine 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Lethal Company, Among Us, Speed Freeks, Hardspace: Shipbreaker, Escape from Tarkov, Shadows of Doubt, Hades 2, Forever Winter... And yeah, some of that stuff is janky or buggy or messy, but it's inventive and cool and slick and all of it is coming from outside of the big names.

  • Outside of a few notable exceptions, older games are ironically more novel and have more interesting gameplay.

    And practically no one can actually afford the super duper premium Nvidia prices required to make an unoptimized UE5 engine game actually run well.

    ... Half of the gaming market in general is gacha games on mobile phones.

    Most permaonline 'hardcore' gamers, people you see on game related discussion forums, as well as industry marketing execs, and yes, both pay for play gaming 'journalists', and most of your favorite youtube/twitch game opinion havers... they're all delusionally out of touch with the basic economic reality most gamers are in.

    This is why things like Stop Killing Games are important.

    Publishers know that existing games are their primary competition, thats why they want them to be unplayable.

    At this point, the disparity is so extreme that I would not be surprised if GTA 6 more or less ends up being the beginning of the end of Rockstar.

    People are not going to be able to pay the prices they will need to charge for their basically 'decade of investment' game that primarily serves as an MTX platform.

    • The performance issues are a major one for me, nothing worse than firing up a new game and getting 40fps with tons of stuttering along the way.

      I feel like most newer games also have trouble with low/medium settings not really being that much better for performance, so there's no fix for it.

      I remember older games where low was like staring at a character made from 12 polygons and everything looked awful, but it would run on just about anything.

      • Its because many game studios just started making many games that just assume you have some kind of raytracing capable GPU.

        They largely stopped bothering to properly support and properly optimize for the hardware situations where you don't.

        A whole bunch of post processing and even just basic scene rendering?

        Yeah, they're now done in kinds of render pipelines that more or less blow up or chug without cards that have at least some ray tracing support, even if you actually have all your in game settings down to as low as possible.

        Its hard to set up lights and bake light maps and such in the old fashioned way, its easy to just let the engine handle all of that for you as a dev, auto magically.

        Problem is, very few dev teams actually know how to use UE5 properly, and on one level, I don't blame them, it is absurdly complex.

        Threat Interactive on youtube more or less has hours of extremely technical breakdowns of UE5 shennanigannery, and also comparisons to somewhat niche techniques used by select, older games, that are as, nearly as, or sometimes actually just better than many UE5 games at realistic high fidelity graphics... while also being more performant, running on older hardware.

        Its exceedingly technical and complicated, but the upshot is: No, you're not crazy, these idiots are often intentionally, often unintentionally, doing things in stupid ways, unnecessary ways.

        EDIT: 12 polygons you say?

        Runs on anything, you say?

        ... ok, hear me out:

        What if there is more to a video game than just how graphically realistic it is... what if it could be immersive, convincing, memorable, complex, not totally railroad you through a blatently OP power fantasy, linear story, even make the player really think about some real world serious shit, while also having a bit of goofy levity from time to time?

        Man if there was a game like that, you'd have to reinstall it or something, sheesh.

        (This entire game fits on a single CD ROM, btw, less than 750 MB)

      • Tim Cain (the lead on the original Fallout and a long time programmer) talked about his experience being a programmer for hire at a major studio later in his career. It as a culture shock for him to see younger programmers basically doing no optimization. When he talked to them about it the attitude was basically that it wasn't worth the time to do, since none of the higher ups cared about it, and the programmers could easily get whatever they assignment was done with bloated, unoptimized code. There wasn't any experience in optimizing or a culture of doing it.

    • to your GTA 6 point: i will not be buying it until it releases on pc. rumor is, and history agrees, that it will be a console only release for like a year. and even then im gonna borrow it first to see if its worth a shit before paying a dime. and i might not pay even if i do like it lol

  • Patient gamer chiming in. I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077 for the first time and loving it. No bugs, a great expansion, and paid $20. For single player games the backlog keeps me a few years behind and the cycle continues.

  • I had some financial troubles recently, so I have not been buying any AAA games for over a year but I have bought some new little games here and there like Peak or some free to play games so my new release percentage is 22%

    54% is 1 to 7 year old games.

    24% is 8 years or older.

    Still rocking Elite Dangerous.

  • I do buy new games even full price on rare occasion. Regardless of that, there's nothing new games do much better than old games besides graphics and that mattering declined hard once league of legends, counter strike, fortnite, minecraft, roblox, etc became people's childhood to their ongoing adulthood games. I've met people that haven't spent a dime on genshin impact while having played for 5 years

    No one is missing out on the best 2025 games if they're playing the best games of 2015. Time is finite and if it's filled with good, what difference does it make if it's new or old. You're not missing out if you're playing the best games of 2000-2014 in 2025.

    I follow emulation on Android communities and people love playing the greatest hits of the PS2, Gamecube, DS, 3DS, PSP, Vita and it seems to mostly be teenagers. And now we're getting good PC emulation support and PS3 and X360 support is progressing. Switch on Android emulation is pretty good now. Android, Steam Machine, Steam Deck, Steam Frame, Legion Go, Rog Ally, GPD Win, Ayaneo. Even Switch 2. The relatively low power gaming scene is growing and that bodes well for "classic/retro/oldies" gaming.

    It's been 12 years since the PS4 launched. Early PS4 games don't play much different than 2025 games. The classics oldie radio station of games are soon going to be very modern. 2007 Bioshock era games are already very modern and look pretty good too

  • All the new releases were under $20 indie or "AA" games like Microprose published titles.

  • I think I bought one game from 2025 this year. Two-Point Museum. Great value. I’ve had a blast with it.

    I’ve no idea what AAA releases have come out this year, and I don’t particularly care. They tend to be garbage anyway.

  • I wonder how much was for 2011 releases because apparently 86% of my time in Steam games this year was in Skyrim.

  • It shows almost all my play time is in new releases but thw only reason for that is that hella my games got free remaster upgrades that are entirely separate titles on Steam. They're not really new releases, IMO. I didn't even pay for them; they were given/replaced for free and without even being asked (in some cases, this is important because what they replaced was better than what they replaced it with).

    • They do this to stay in the top of the lists, pushing down actually new games from smaller studios.

  • Yeah, 3% of mine was new releases! 8% was from 1-7 years, and 89% was 8+. It's not because of the cost of games or upgrades though, I just don't care about most of the new games that come out. I already have games I like to play!

  • I must have play 3-4 games and not more than 40 hours this entire years, and it says my stats makes me in the top 15% gamers. I find it hard to believe.

  • Hmm, I think I actually spent more time than usual playing new games this year, though one of them was the Oblivion Remaster. I really liked Avowed.

  • This year I basically ditched gaming. Last year I was juggling like fourteen games on three different platforms- but after an accident where I could not use my right hand for a month, I was forced to lose the streak and since then I've barely touched a controller. My time this year was spent in, no joke, just three games on PC. Balatro because of course, Monster Hunter Wilds because I had already preordered it (and I eventually had to drop it because of lack of time), and Final Fantasy from the Pixel Remaster (because I found about GameHub for Android and wanted to test a lightweight game my phone could run). Next year things might change and I might tackle my backlog again, but with the same two-ish hours of free time per day on weekdays, I doubt it.

127 comments