- Dec 30, 2012
- 4,809
Just how addicted to Steam games are Steam's gamers? All the data is publicly available for those who have the time or wherewithal to crunch it, and Ars Technica has done just that.
What the tech site found is that some gamers are eager to snap up titles, but fail to log a significant amount of time playing them. "Right now, I can tell you that about 37 percent of the roughly 781 million games registered to various Steam accounts haven't even been loaded a single time," according to Ars.
Dubbed the "Steam Gauge," Ars's exclusive-for-right-now scrubbing tool churned through the public profiles of random Steam user accounts for about two months as the site worked to construct its methodology for assessing the popularity of games on Steam.
Unfortunately, the site just doesn't have the computing power to run through the entire 172+ million Steam member database on a daily basis, but it can pull approximately 80-90,000 profiles in a given day. The results for a three-day window are all lumped together to create the up-to-date stats for Ars's data tool.
"While we feel our methodology is sound, we wouldn't be comfortable reporting these numbers unless we were able to spot check their accuracy and reliability against some real-world data. Fortunately, we've been able to compare our estimates to both public and private Steam sales data in a few cases now, and we've been pleased with how comparable the results have been," Ars said.
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