Between holiday sales and game bundles, it's too easy to shell out money for a ludicrous number of games and forget about half of them. Many a Steam user's library may boast hundreds of games, but it's likely that most of these titles are untouched.
According to data collected by Ars Technica from 172 million Steam profile pages (collected from 80-90K users a day for months), about 36 percent of registered Steam games are left untouched.
There's also plenty of other interesting figures to glean from the data. Unsurprisingly, the two most owned games on Steam are free-to-play ones with DotA 2 at 25.93 million and Team Fortress 2 at 20 million. The next most owned game is apparently Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, though Ars estimates that the game might be loaded up on many Steam user's computers and left untouched.
What about the most played game on Steam in terms of hours dedicated per user? Surprisingly, it isn't Call of Duty, Dota 2 or Skyrim, but Football Manager. Owners have clocked in, on average, over 100 hours into the game. Apparently, when the addiction sets in for Football Manager, it really sets in...
The biggest takeaways from Ars Technica's data is in terms of sales. According to Ars's numbers, it's worthwhile for publishers to chase big hits for their portfolio. Steam is very, very hit-driven, and the year's biggest titles are the ones that "represent 83.1 percent of all sales and 87.7 percent of all played games." In terms of total hours, the top 20 percent of games represent about 98 percent of Steam's overall play times.
