PING: SI Games

[flere-imsaho]

Introducing Steam Gauge: Ars reveals Steam’s most popular games | Ars Technica

See, specifically, page 2:

Other games may not be best-sellers, by Steam standards, but make up for it with an extremely devoted fan base. These are the games that everyone seems to get addicted to as soon as they play them, resulting in extremely high mean and median hours played among all owners (games with fewer than 50,000 total sales have been omitted in this analysis to avoid skewing the results with games that don't have a critical mass of players in our sample).

By these metrics, Football Manager 2014 is clearly the most popular game on Steam, nearly doubling the median hours spent of the second game on the list. Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag shows surprising longevity among players, half of whom put 36 hours or more into a game that reviews say only requires 20 hours or so to complete the main story. Games like Mount & Blade: Warband and Europa Universalis IV also distinguish themselves with fanbases whose average play time outperforms their raw sales numbers.

[flere-imsaho]

The upside being, of course, that while FM is busy ruining your life, you are definitely getting your money worth from your purchase.

[NobodyHere]

Farming Simulator?

[flere-imsaho]

Originally Posted by NobodyHere

Farming Simulator?

You make me sad.

[NobodyHere]

Originally Posted by flere-imsaho

You make me sad.

Cheer up Brian

Always Look On The Bright Side of Life - YouTube

[Marc Vaughan]

Cool - would be interesting to see the figures for smaller selling titles (ie. less than 50k) as I think you'd see OOTP in that and probably some other more niche strategy titles ...

(it'd also be useful as a way to see 'up and coming' titles - those with passionate fanbases are more likely to evangelise their love ...)

[flere-imsaho]

I loved this from Kotaku:

Sure, DOTA 2 dominates many categories in raw numbers, but it's free and it's a little misleading. You'll find that Football Manager and Civ V are right up there in terms of time wasted/marriages threatened.

[Drake]

That should be your company motto: Football Manager: Threat to Your Marriage.
...or maybe: FM 2014: More Threatening to Your Marriage than Porn

[CAsterling]

Am I correct in remembering that FM has actually been one of the reasons cited for divorce, and more than once, in divorces in England.

[flere-imsaho]

Originally Posted by Drake

FM 2014: More Threatening to Your Marriage than Porn

It's funny because it's true!

Originally Posted by CAsterling

Am I correct in remembering that FM has actually been one of the reasons cited for divorce, and more than once, in divorces in England.

Yes.

[DaddyTorgo]

169?

HAHA. I have like 1000 or so hours on FM 2014 alone.

[flere-imsaho]

I don't even want to log into Steam to check. Luckily my Steam history for FM only goes back to FM2011. If I was to add up all the time I've spent on the game since 1995....

[TroyF]

I don't have to check. The top two on that list are the top two for me and nothing else really comes close. There is a massive separation between 1 and 2 as well. I just got back into Skyrim (never go the DLC, wanted to finish up some missions) and I've put in something like 128 hours into it.

If I added up all the FM's I purchased on Steam and added them up, it would get ugly. Really, really ugly.

[larrymcg421]

This made me curious to look at my list. My top 5 on Steam:

FM12: 1725
Orcs Must Die 2: 774
FM13: 169
Orcs Must Die: 108
Banished: 36

Almost all of those hours for FM12 came in the few months between getting fired from my job and going back to school. I graduated and got a job, which is why the FM13 number is so much lower.

[mckerney]

My top played:

Dota 2 - 2366
Left 4 Dead 2 - 314
Dragon Age: Oranges - 240
Terraria - 136
Mass Effect 2 - 124
Skyrim - 103
Team Fortress 2 - 88
Civ IV - 61
Mass Effect - 59
Hero Academy - 53
Civ V - 53
Fallout: New Vegas - 53
Left 4 Dead - 50

[Butter]

Originally Posted by flere-imsaho

I loved this from Kotaku:

Sure, DOTA 2 dominates many categories in raw numbers, but it's free and it's a little misleading. You'll find that Football Manager and Civ V are right up there in terms of time wasted/marriages threatened.

Just do what I did: Get your wife into Civ V. Problem solved.

[Blackadar]

Here's my top 7 on Steam:

FM 2012: 568 hours
Civ V: 408
Skyrim: 365
Terraria: 205
Mass Effect 2: 156
FM 2010: 151
X-Com: 115

Yet if you asked me, I would not say that FM 2012 or 2010 were my "top played" games. Why? Because unlike virtually every other game, I tended not to shut down FM and went to bed with it still running. Other games have music and sounds and therefore I tended to shut them down when I was done. But FM would run virtually every night when I was actively playing it. With no sound to bother me, there was no reason to shut it down. I'd play it in the airport and then close the laptop (which doesn't shut the laptop down) and fly with it running in the background.

So of that 568 hours, there's at least a couple hundred that were spent not playing the game and it just running in the background. Whereas there was very little of that with Civ V, Terraria or ME2.

PS. If I had Civ IV on Steam, I'd have over 1,000 hours on that puppy. And god knows how much on WoW and LOTRO.

[JPhillips]

Originally Posted by Blackadar

Here's my top 7 on Steam:

FM 2012: 568 hours
Civ V: 408
Skyrim: 365
Terraria: 205
Mass Effect 2: 156
FM 2010: 151
X-Com: 115

Yet if you asked me, I would not say that FM 2012 or 2010 were my "top played" games. Why? Because unlike virtually every other game, I tended not to shut down FM and went to bed with it still running. Other games have music and sounds and therefore I tended to shut them down when I was done. But FM would run virtually every night when I was actively playing it. With no sound to bother me, there was no reason to shut it down. I'd play it in the airport and then close the laptop (which doesn't shut the laptop down) and fly with it running in the background.

So of that 568 hours, there's at least a couple hundred that were spent not playing the game and it just running in the background. Whereas there was very little of that with Civ V, Terraria or ME2.

PS. If I had Civ IV on Steam, I'd have over 1,000 hours on that puppy. And god knows how much on WoW and LOTRO.

I do the same thing with FM, partly for the reasons you stated and partly because I can do other things without any lag if I keep it minimized.

[DaddyTorgo]

FM 2014: 904 hours
FM 2013: 1105 hours
FM 2012: 865 hours
FM 2011: 826 hours
FM 2010: 652 hours

You might say I have a problem. No doubt by summer FM 2014 will have eclipsed FM 2013.

Unless I go back to 2013 and get re-engergized by the saga of Jodi Masciadri to become the greatest player in history again.

[flere-imsaho]

Huh, whenever I've put a computer to sleep with FM still running it's turned out to be a crashy mess when I wake the computer up.

[TroyF]

My top 3 (kind of)

#3) Borderlands 2 - 129 hours
#2) Skyrim - 138 hours (and counting)
#1) All versions of FM on Steam combined 4,491 hours. OK, as Blackadar said, some of that time is due to keeping the PC on and going to bed. That said, I 'm fairly certain the actual number is well over 2000 hours which simply dwarfs any other game I have played on Steam.


No way to track, but I know I put in a lot of hours on The Show, GTA series, and Oblivion on the consoles.