Steam Replay, Valve’s yearly roundup of where all of the hours spent playing games in the Steamy place have gone, has emerged from its hidey-hole yet again. 2025’s edition is out now – you’ve likely already seen it if you’ve hopped into Steam since yesterday afternoon. Amid all the bits telling you that you’ve spent 1000 hours playing Umamusume: Pretty Derby thus far, the annual report’s dished out some fresh stats about how old the games everyone across the platform’s user base has been playing this year are.
To get a bit navel gazey for a second, these Replays usually stand more than anything to remind me how much doing this job generally warps the game playing habits of myself and my peers away from the norm. For instance, 28% of my personal playtime this year was spent on games which came out in 2025, a decent chunk more than the worldwide average of 14% across the entirety of the Steamaverse. For context, that’s also with some new releases I’ve spent a lot of time with this year – The Outer Worlds 2 chief among them – not having been counted as part of that total due to circumstance dictating I didn’t put my hours into them via my personal Steam account.
That 14% figure across all Steam users is only down a single percentage point from last year’s total of 15%, with 2023 and 2022’s figures sitting at 9% and 17% respectively. So, things very much look to have settled into a mid-teens ball park. The game playage this year’s rounded out by 44% of our collective time being dedicated to games which have been out for one to seven years and 40% being dedicated to games eight years or older.
Those last two also generally stack up pretty similarly to previous years, though there was a pretty weird flip-flop in terms of the largest majority from 64% of the older lot to 52% in favour of the one-to-seven crowd from 2022 to 2023. Sadly, the data doesn’t go back any further than that, let alone to pre-2008 so we could see what these numbers looked like prior to the first of the approximately ten million financial belt-tightenings we’ve all lived through since that point.
Anyway, as a palette cleanser following that maths, here’s a very tragic personal factoid. Last year, I managed a longest streak of 69 consecutive days firing up a game on Steam. It was totally by accident that this ended up being the sex number, I swear. This year, I regret to inform you that my longest streak ran to 97 days, which – aside from inferring a slightly more dire state in terms of my ability to drag myself away from my keyboard – is not a funny number.
And what is life if you’re not accidentally racking up funny numbers whenever possible?
Mark Warren
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