Valve’s Year In Review for Steam recently launched, and revealed an interesting metric about its platform’s playerbase.
Next to a breakdown of the games users played this year is a factoid that only 15 percent of Steam players spent their time on games released in 2024. Conversely, 47 percent of players devoted their time to games from the past 1-7 years (or “recent favorites”), and 37 percent played titles from eight or more years ago (“classics”).
For comparison, 17 percent of Steam users played 2022’s then-current games, and 2023 was lower at 9 percent. The ratio of recent favorites for 2022 and 2023 were 19 percent and 52 percent, respectively, and classics for each year were 62 percent and 38 percent.
Throughout 2024, games like Helldivers 2, Marvel Rivals, and Balatro saw large player numbers or sales (or both). However, Steam’s most-played titles are currently led by older, free-to-play titles: 2023’s Counter-Strike 2, 2013’s Dota 2, and 2017’s PUBG.
Behind those are Marvel Rivals and Path of Exile II, which both launched earlier this month. Sky’s Banana is the third game of the year to round out Steam’s Top 10 most-played, and it was also released this past December.
As PCGamer notes, Steam also houses 201,695 games. According to SteamDB, this year had 18,687 releases, up 30 percent from 2023’s 14,313 games.