The staying power of simulations

Free-to-play titles might dominate the raw "ownership" data, but traditional pay-to-own games look a lot better when you look at how many hours the average player is putting in. Just like last year, Football Manager players show an absolutely insane devotion to their favorite title, with nearly twice as many mean hours as the nearest competition. Simulation games in general seem to eat up a lot of time within their niche of players; even relatively unknown titles like The Golf Club and Train Fever put in strong showings in the average hours department.

Total hours played is a bit of a weird statistic to evaluate: games that have sold more are going to have an inherent advantage here. This can be a particularly misleading statistic when looking at relatively recent releases, though, since titles from earlier in the year have had months of additional prime play time compared to holiday releases.

Dividing out by days on the market, it's interesting to find a number of games that have racked up gameplay hours despite relatively low sales and time on the market. Titles like Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, Assetto Corsa, and Civilization: Beyond Earth have demanded a lot of play time and attention in a short amount of time on the market, and these could look even better in the aggregate data if that interest has staying power.

Older releases in 2014

When we started collecting Steam Gauge data last year, one major limitation was that we couldn't tell when the sales or gameplay hours we were measuring had been logged. All we knew for sure was the aggregate life-to-date data up to that point. Now that we've been watching the market for a while, we can at least figure out how ownership and gameplay hours have been changing since the project started. To do this, we have subtracted out the current aggregate numbers from the numbers we had back in early April 2014 to determine what's been happening in the Steam market specifically in the last 11 months (even for older games).

Game sales in the last 11 months or so have predictably been dominated by new releases: seven of the top 20 were released in 2014, and seven more were released in 2013. Interestingly, a few of the top performers during this time period are indie games that saw sales accelerate quickly in the last year or so after being quite weak before that. Early Access title Interstellar Marines saw about 100,000 sales in its first nine months turn into 3.7 million more sales in its next 11, while Dino D-Day turned about 170,000 sales in its first two years into 2.9 million total sales after about another year on the market.

One unfortunate reality of the game business is that very few games have staying power to see continued play for more than a few weeks or a few months. A few select Steam games see continued play even after years, though, and you can see those in the above chart. The list shows a good mix of different types of titles with longevity—MMOs, shooters, strategy games, epic RPGs, and sports games all make appearances. Bejeweled 2 Deluxe and Garry's Mod deserve special mention, however, for still drawing significant playtime from owners new and old despite being released in 2006 (CivCity Rome, released in 2007, is also impressive on this score).

One final slice of the recent data is a list of Steam titles I refer to as "back from the dead" in 2014. These are older games (released 2012 or before) that saw their daily sales rate shoot up in the last 11 months from relatively weak sales before then. Crash Time 2, for example, saw only 11 average daily sales from its late 2009 release until April of 2014. In the last 11 months, the game spiked to over 1,300 average daily sales, and it's now registered to nearly 470,000 Steam accounts.

Sure, the fact that VG247 and BundleStars gave away 500,000 Steam keys for Crash Time 2 may have a lot to do with that increase. And many of the other top performers here were likewise included in bundles or offered at significant discounts in 2014 to achieve their accelerated sales. Regardless, just because an older game hasn't sold well so far doesn't mean it can't turn things around with some good marketing.

(On the next page, enjoy some nearly raw data from the top 400 Steam releases of 2014)