Steam Replay 2024 Reveals Only 15% Of Total Playtime Spent On New Releases
Steam’s Replay 2024, which was previously called Year in Review, revealed that just 15% of total playtime across the entire service was spent on new releases.
As noted by Steam, the 2024 Steam Replay is a custom report for each account that shares how many games you played, how many achievements you unlocked, your longest log-in streak, and how it all compared to the previous year.
There are also graphs depicting “what kind of games you played” and other pieces of data showing “playtime by month; playtime by what you played; even playtime across your Steam Family if you’re part of one!”
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As part of the custom Replay, one of the charts shows your break down by how much time you spent on new releases (games released in 2024), recent releases (released within 1-7 years), and classic games (releases from 8 or more years ago).
It also compares your data to all Steam Users. For classic releases, time spent hit 37% of all time spent on Steam.
For recent, it was 47%.
And for new releases it was only 15%.
This is not at all surprising. Assassin’s Creed Executive Producer Marc-Alexis Côté noted during a Fireside Keynote at the External Development Summit in October that developers are not only competing against other studios, but they are competing against their own back catalogue.
He explained, “There’s so much to offer. When you come out with an Assassin’s Creed game. You’re not only competing against the competition, you’re competing against your own back catalogue. So if you’ve released a hit game like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and you come out with a new game, your old game is six years old … but you can have it for $20. So the $80 game that I come out with better be very, very good. Because of back catalogue that’s widely accessible, because of subscription services it’s putting a lot of pressure on innovation being better.”
Furthermore, former World of Warcraft Team Lead Mark Kern aka Grummz called for a moratorium on all AAA woke games earlier this year.
He posted in April, “Calling on all game[r]s to NOT buy any AAA titles for the next 2 years that do this. Play your Steam backlog. You will send a very clear message.”
He added, “Lara Croft did nothing wrong, and does not need fixing.”
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He recently reiterated this writing on X, “I made a plan with everyone in March to take down DEI in AAA gaming, specifically targeting Ubisoft: 1) Point out wokeness 2) Reach out to YouTubers 3) 2 Years of non-buying woke AAA to stop the spread. Are you feeling the impact yet? We've got more for you in 2025.”
Based on this Steam data, it seems Kern’s moratorium is indeed having an affect on top of many gamers simply choosing to play their back catalogue over new games.
What do you make of the fact that only 15% of all playtime on Steam was spent on new games?
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