Some truly impressive data-hacking by the technology site Ars Technica is offering new estimates about what people are playing on the super-popular PC gaming platform Steam.
Based on months-long daily scrape of publicly viewable user Steam user IDs, gaming editor Kyle Orland has developed what he calls the "Steam Gauge," and it is a much richer picture of what goes on inside Steam than owner-operator Valve Interactive has ever offered.
Here are some of the key takeaways, but it's worth reading the whole thing if you play on Steam, or just like data journalism.
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- A huge chunk of games downloaded on Steam have never been played
- The most-owned games on Steam were made by Valve (yes, that includes free-to-play monsters like Dota 2, so it skews the numbers a little)
- The most-played games (since 2009) are a more mixed bag, with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Football Manager 2014 in the lead (the latter is a clearly addictive simulation where you manage your own soccer club).
Seriously, read the whole thing. It's great.
Note that Mr. Orland's methodology has come under fire for randomly sampling a very small percentage of the total user base. A second article lays out methods in even more detail, and I was persuaded that this is at the very least a good reference point for how to think about Steam. Also, here's the Steam Gauge top 100 most-played games.