Are Popular Games Played Less?

A look at the playing habits of Steam users of the top 10 owned games.

Popularity can be a curse, or so many of us have been led to believe. Does this translate to popular video games? Do droves of casuals flood free-to-play games and quit after playing for an hour?

These were some of the questions that came into mind when I began to investigate data from steam users that contained games they owned as well as how many hours they played of each.

So, let’s take a look at the top 10 games owned.

Not surprising, considering this data is from 2016. A few interesting points to remember: the top 4 games are free to play, and Unturned (the 4th most owned) is not only free-to-play but was in Early-Access at the time (Early-Access games are not feature complete, are used for testing, and are generally not heavily marketed).

After some data cleanup and calculations I found the total average hours played per player.

It looks like, against my initial expectation, that 8 of the top 10 games have averages well above the total average of all hours played per game. Perhaps taking a look at the max hours played on each game may give us some more insight?

At a glance, it looks like these go along with the averages, meaning that while there may be more players that play fewer hours, there looks to be more players that put in an astonishing amount of hours.

Let’s look at how much the data deviates.

The deviation denotes the range of the values of our data, so the higher the deviation, the more the data varies. While the data follows the other graphs, it demonstrates that some players are greatly increasing the average of games with alot of play time (and vice versa).

So do casuals drive down the average play hours of a game? Yes, but not nearly as much as gamers dedicated to those games increase the average hours played of those popular games.

2019 Eric Ramon — nephylum.github.io

Data from tamber