I had forgotten that Steam does a year end summary until I saw some other bloggers posting theirs. I must have missed the giant splash page on the home page of Steam when it was up right before the Winter Sale kicked off. Luckily, I was still able to find the link from this Steam news post.
I am a sucker for end of the year wrap ups and stats. There’s just something about seeing an activity laid out in a nice graph that makes my brain happy. Usually I’m pretty good at guessing what the stats will show but sometimes they can reveal a surprise or two.
As a side note, my Replay from 2023 was missing from the bottom of the 2024 Replay page and I only had a button for 2022. I fixed this by changing the end of the URL from https://store.steampowered.com/replay/yoursteamIDnumber/2024 to 2023 to get to last years Replay. Once I did that, the button for 2023 appeared at the bottom of this year’s Replay page.
If you asked me to sum up my gaming in 2024 before I looked at my Steam Replay I would have said I played less games than last year and spent less time gaming over all. Unfortunately, Steam Replay only breaks down game play time in percentages rather than hours so there isn’t a good way to determine if I spent more or less time gaming this year. However, it does track games played and, as it turns out, I played more games than last year. A grand total of 69, which is 11 games more than 2023. Now whether this means I actually played 11 more games than last year is debatable. Since there is a stat for number of sessions on played games, I am assuming that Steam counts a game as played if it was booted up during the year. So maybe I opened up more games this year than last year in a few fits of indecision when deciding what to play.
My most played game this year was Trove, making up 15% of my playtime over 34 sessions. The Gear Update released in March of this year which added a new tier of Crystal gear to chase after and a crafting system which makes gearing up way easier. I popped back in after learning about the update in April and spent most of May in Trove. This tracks with how I typically engage with the game these days, activating a Patron pass, playing for a month, and then falling off when the Patron pass ends. I’m sure I’ll be back in Trove sometime in 2025, I always come back….
The spider graph…well it’s there. Some of it makes sense, NGU Idle was my second most played game this year so the strong trend towards Idler makes sense. Racing and Driving makes sense too.I got into sim racing at the beginning of the year, playing a lot of Asseto Corsa and Automobilista 2. I finished up the year playing mostly Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator in December. I’m still trying to puzzle out why Tower Defense, Collectathon, and Action Rouglike are on there.
Below are my top played games, which is what I’m guessing these categories are taken from:
The only game here that I screams Action Rougelike to me is Lethal Company which made up 3% of my playtime this year.
Esports Godfather ( a terrible name I know, but a fun game) is a MOBA Esport team manager game/ deckbuilder. MOBAs do have towers that need defending so maybe that’s how this category go in there? With the addition of Game Dev Tycoon I would change this category to Management.
That leaves Collectathon, which I tend to relate to 3D platformers in the vein of Mario 64, which I certainly didn’t play any of this year. But if I apply the term with a more literal interpretation, I could see Disney Dreamlight Valley or Secrets of Grindea filling this category pretty well.
I like this graph, as it summarizes up the entire year nicely. The solid colors are a single game where the grey is everything else. tend to play one game intensly and then ditch it for something new which appears to be at a rate of once per month this year. It also confirms my suspicion that I spend a lot of time playing games in the winter until the weather starts to get nice. Then even less gaming time as the holidays roll around. This graph doesn’t show the time I spent playing Guild Wars 2 this summer. If it did, you’d see a sizable color bar on July and August.
Hope you had a good year!
Many Welps 