One of the benefits of every platform now having an end-of-year recap is that interesting data, normally reserved for our corporate overlords, becomes publicly available. For instance, according to data gleaned from Steam's Replay, just 14 per cent of 2025's total playtime was spent on games released in 2025 (nice spot, Tweaktown).
According to the data, users spend on average 40 per cent of their playtime on games released more than eight years ago. This shouldn't come as a surprise, as Dota 2, PUBG: Battlegrounds, Warframe, Grand Theft Auto 5 (Legacy) and Rust, some of Steam's most-played games, all fit in this category.
Add this to the 44% of playtime spent on games between 1 and 7 years old, and you're left with 14 per cent of playtime for games released in 2025. The reasons for this are numerous. The total playtime metric is dominated by live-service games, as players often finish a single-player game and then stop playing, but will continue to regularly play live-service games throughout the entire year.
The median number of unique games played by a user on Steam is 4, which is a testament to how many accounts...
