While browsing games on Steam the other day, I noticed that many gamers who have recorded thousands of hours on a given game don’t recommend it (i.e., they provide negative reviews). This could be for a variety of reasons: they don’t like the game, they liked it but something changed and now they don’t like it anymore, or they do like it but are being funny. Many people change their review from positive to negative due to a glitchy update, charging for mods, increasing the game price (then offering it on sale for the original price), or having too many hackers in the community.

I pulled 3,000+ reviews for each game (1,500+ positive and 1,500+ negative) to create these distributions of hours played by review type. There were two exceptions (Rocket League and Civilization V) where there weren’t enough helpful negative reviews – in both those cases I used all the available negative reviews. The violin plots show the median (white dot), interquartile range (thick black bar), 1.5*IQR (thin black bar), and full range (extent of violin). I’ve limited the y-axis to 5,000 hrs, but many reviews came from players who logged far more – some reviews had over 15,000 hrs on a single game, which is impressive given that a year is ~8,766 hrs.

Of course, the violins show that gamers who recommend a game tend to play it for more hours. That said, the negative review distributions still show significant hours logged! Let’s all try to remember that we play video games because we enjoy them – if they stop being fun, it’s probably time to stop playing.

Data source: http://store.steampowered.com/