Re: $19 billion on unplayed games

On 6/27/2024 9:39 AM, Xocyll wrote:

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
say:
 

>
You've probably read -or at least heard mentioned- the news story that
Steam users have spent $19 billion USD on games they've never played.*
(If so, you've probably also heard some wag jokingly claim, "Yeah,
well, I'm probably responsible for $1 billion of that"**.) You may
even have heard counters to this estimate, calling it wildly
inaccurate (something I myself tend to agree with).

 Hadn't but I doubt the number is anywhere near accurate.
 Steam only counts playtime If and only IF you started the game through
steam.
 Star Trek Online for instance was sold as a game direct from the company
first, then downloadable through arc (still is) and then through steam.
 You can start it without steam knowing.
 It says 146.2 hrs for a game I've played near daily for over a decade,
because I only ever started it through steam if I was make a game
currency purchase.
 The couple years of play of Fallout4, according to steam amounts to 11
minutes.
 Path of Exile, another heavily played one, no time at all.
 Warframe, haven't played it years but played it heavily for a while,
steam says 6 minutes.
 So yeah, not trusting "Valve Math", since it apparently assumes no one
can live without steam or would start a game any other way.
 And that's not even counting the value of the freebies that we
"purchased" for nothing - how are they being counted, as a zero value
sale, or regular price - betting it's regular price.
 

Oh yeah, I've definitely got some I haven't played according to Steam but most definitely did.
I've got a lot of the opposite too, where I just left a game running even overnight because it was a pain to exit and/or start it and didn't become unstable.  Or in the case of the DS series my hours are probably wildly exaggerated as I often think I closed it, but that just returned it to the title screen, as you can't just exit game (well Alt-F4 works but has some likelihood of not saving your progress)
--
-Justisaur
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