Steam’s 2025 Replay reveals we all once again spent around 14% of our time on games released in the same year—which apparently shakes out to a median of 0.56 new games
The Steam recap for 2025 is now live: and you know what that means! Honey, it’s time for your regularly scheduled “thinking about numbers too much” session. Buckle up, I’m about to get theoretical—hypothetical, even.
As you can find out for yourself by opening Steam and clicking the big “Steam Replay” button on the storefront, the percentage playtime spent by all Steam users in 2025 on games, released in the same year, was 14%.
Valve doesn’t share its exact working, here, but I’m happy to assume that the company makes an effort to bar completely inactive accounts in these tallies, because Steam’s been kicking for over 22 years at this point—if it didn’t, that number would be a lot smaller.
I’m also made more reasonably confident by the fact that this is a pattern that’s held (somewhat) stable for four years now—with only one outlier in 2023. As we noted last year, the historical data for this same statistic are as follows:
- Players spent 17% of their time on same-year releases in 2022…
- 9% in 2023
- and 15% in 2024.
With 14% of players doing so in 2025, it’s starting to become a safe bet to assume that number will, on your average calendar year, hang around the 15% mark.
As far as that 14% number goes, that’s around 7/50ths of time spent on same-year release games for your average user, which means if you played 300 hours of games this year, statistically, you spent around 42 hours on new releases. Funnily enough, if we take the median amount of games actually played—a mere four—that means that, on average, we have all collectively played… er, 0.56 new games.
I’m being facetious, here, but it is an interesting statistic, especially given how volatile the industry’s been these past few years—it’s almost a shame the Steam replays stop at 2022, because I’d be more interested to see how these numbers hold up against an era that wasn’t flooded with live-service cash grabs, recession-threatening tariffs, cancelled games and rampant layoffs.
Basically: When we all had a bit more money to spend and the industry wasn’t imploding in slow motion. But for now, we just have to look forward to next year’s releases—which, statistically speaking, we’ll all be playing 7/50ths of. I’m very “e”, which is 7/50ths of the word excited, rounded up (no really, I checked, 7/50ths of seven letters is 0.98 letters).
Oh, and if you’re curious, I played 46% new releases, because I’m simply built different.
