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Art Technica put together a list of some of the most popular and some of the least popular games on Steam. They go on a bit about how they gathered the data but that's a bit boring. I mean, if you really want to know, you can head over to read their full article or simply look below for the interesting stuff outlined in the headline.
They note that while they feel their charts are fairly accurate, the "hours played" metric was not even introduced into Steam until March of 2009. Thus, any time played in games prior to that time frame were not recorded and probably screwed up a lot of their findings for older titles.
It's a very interesting and rather in-depth look at how a variety of games fair with consumers. Be sure to head on over to Ars Technica for the full two page article.
As you can see, just because a game is registered to a lot of Steam accounts doesn't mean it's popular. Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, for instance, is the third-most popular game on the service by ownership, registered to about 12.8 million Steam accounts by our count. But the tech demo, which shows off some deleted content from Half-Life 2, has only been actively loaded up by about 2.1 million of those owners, placing it behind 35 other Steam games by that metric. That may sound hard to believe, but remember that Lost Coast was offered for free to everyone who bought Half-Life 2 through Steam, putting it on millions of accounts that may not have been interested in playing it. Nvidia and ATI later offered the demo to anyone who bought one of their graphics cards as well.
Before you protest that this number sounds incredibly high, consider how many Steam games you’ve acquired through some sort of indie game bundle or ridiculous seasonal sale. You probably heard some good buzz about these titles and told yourself you’d find the time to play them some day in the future. Then you went right back to playing Team Fortress 2 for dozens of hours every week instead, didn’t you?
They note that while they feel their charts are fairly accurate, the "hours played" metric was not even introduced into Steam until March of 2009. Thus, any time played in games prior to that time frame were not recorded and probably screwed up a lot of their findings for older titles.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that looking at the total number of players is very different from (and in some ways more accurate than) looking at the total number of owners a game has achieved on Steam, as you can see in the above chart. Games like Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 are ridiculously popular by either metric, but looking at players instead of owners replaces heavily ignored games like Ricochet and Deathmatch Classic with popular-with-players titles like Alien Swarm and Terraria in our Top 20.
Other games may not be best-sellers, by Steam standards, but make up for it with an extremely devoted fan base. These are the games that everyone seems to get addicted to as soon as they play them, resulting in extremely high mean and median hours played among all owners (games with fewer than 50,000 total sales have been omitted in this analysis to avoid skewing the results with games that don't have a critical mass of players in our sample).
By these metrics, Football Manager 2014 is clearly the most popular game on Steam, nearly doubling the median hours spent of the second game on the list. Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag shows surprising longevity among players, half of whom put 36 hours or more into a game that reviews say only requires 20 hours or so to complete the main story. Games like Mount & Blade: Warband and Europa Universalis IV also distinguish themselves with fanbases whose average play time outperforms their raw sales numbers.
By these metrics, Football Manager 2014 is clearly the most popular game on Steam, nearly doubling the median hours spent of the second game on the list. Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag shows surprising longevity among players, half of whom put 36 hours or more into a game that reviews say only requires 20 hours or so to complete the main story. Games like Mount & Blade: Warband and Europa Universalis IV also distinguish themselves with fanbases whose average play time outperforms their raw sales numbers.
It's a very interesting and rather in-depth look at how a variety of games fair with consumers. Be sure to head on over to Ars Technica for the full two page article.