Steam Gauge: Steam’s most popular games | Hacker News Reader

Steam Gauge: Steam’s most popular games

arstechnica.com

56 pointskeerthiko45 comments

Games scare me because of their addictiveness, especially for people who need an escape from crappy things in their lives. I enjoy them occasionally as much as the next person, but it makes me sad to see how high the play numbers are for some games. A good friend of mine in college pretty much ruined his life by using Team Fortress 2 as his "coping" mechanism for depression: he logged 2000+ hours on the game in 6 months before he was asked to leave the institute only one class shy of his degree.

Yeah, I purchased Civ V a while ago but I can't bring myself to actually play it. I think I'm too old to lose 4 hours to a game that gives me no real benefit.

"Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted."

I was about to correct you and say that was Bertrand Russell but apparently it was neither of them - http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/11/time-you-enjoy/.

Interesting article. Thanks for the fact check!

I agree with that line, but it feels like sometimes we are tricked into feeling like we're enjoying something, when we really are not. What matters is if afterwards, if you feel like you wasted that time.

I bought it and played it. I logged 14 hours on it over three days, and then I put it down. It's a game that sucks you in. Fantastic game, though!

I plan a mini 2-3 day holiday every year just to play the latest civilization. Apart from that I play very little but I feel that it's nice to plan ahead so that I can waste time without feeling guilty.

That's harsh. It's supposed to be for fun. Surely you've had more than 4 hours of fun in your life? Not that you have to do it playing Civ V of course.

You could watch a livestream on Twitch instead: it can even be fun to chat with other viewers or you can even work on other things at the same time. It's not as good as playing the game yourself, but it can be an alternattive.

But do you spend time watching TV? There's no real difference, if you enjoy spending time doing something then you should do it. Whats the point in working hard if you don get to chill out?

2000 hours/ 180 days = 11 hours a day? :( scary

It is frightening, but I wonder about the previous generations. A hundred years ago, how did an individual self-medicate their problems? Was there more crime, suicide, etc. as a result? People don't usually "change" all that much from generation to generation, and I don't want to get into some trap of thinking about "golden days" or any of that nonsense; people have always been fitful and worried, depressive even. How did they cope?

I look at people in my parent's generation who have no hobbies, no outlets, nothing... They are bored individuals who watch the news and maybe do some gardening. I would love to breach the age gap and introduce a great uncle to a video game, or my great grandmother to scrabble online. I feel like the last generation that will ever go lonely unless by decision, and I owe it in part to these fantastical video games.

This is something I've been thinking about as well. Whenever I meet someone who doesn't play videogames, I ask them what they do in their spare time (because it's an idea I can't comprehend). It's always "watch tv" or "facebook" or "reddit" or something equally mundane. I'd rather be engaging my brain, thinking spatially, and solving interesting problems.

I used to be a heavy gamer, now I spend my spare time doing research and working on side projects that will make me a better developer. I now find this infinitely more rewarding than video games. At a certain age the entertainment value of the games was ruined by mortal terror at the rapid increase in the rate of my birthdays. :)

Do you not feel that workin on side projects all the time wears you down? I haven't had one for about 5 months now, I've been working so hard on other stuff, that I need something like LoL, WoW, or battlefield to take my mind off things on the evenings.

I'm curious to see what happens as our age group gets older. Right now few focus on developing applications, games or social networks for elderly individuals, since there isn't a big audience. As we age, I think we'll see a lot more technology designed to helping the elderly, and hopefully it'll allow them to stay more mentally stimulated, less lonely, and provide ways for them to further contribute so society online.

Well clearly people haven't changed, but the activities available to us have. Instant and repetitive positive feedback is trivially available. It's tons easier to accelerate one's progress through any particular path.

Games have always been devices for both socialization and addiction. It's not a variable that meaningfully changes.

I'm about to drop out 2 classes shy from my bachelor's... for the second time. I've been fighting depression for the past decade, and I relapsed again this semester.

Gaming was my coping mechanism in the past, but I haven't played games for over 5 years now. It's merely a symptom, there are plenty of other coping mechanisms available.

Wow that's a lot. I've got ~3000 hours of TF2 (and a couple hundred hours in other games) but I've been playing TF2 since early 2008 and it never affected my grades at school or my work.

I agree that time I enjoyed is definitely not time wasted. Playing with friends is just as good as programming to me. It's 100% unproductive though.

Games aren't addictive by themselves - only in fringe cases like your friend. And used as a coping mechanism, it's perhaps the least health-detrimental option (compared to alcohol, drugs, cutting yourself, just sitting there doing nothing and enjoying the feel of starving to death..), plus with multiplayer games you get to interact with other, normal, healthy people.

Mental illness is scary.

I hear that a lot from people, but from my personal experience I find them no more addictive than books or TV. I find most single player games take somewhere in between reading a book and watching season of a TV show, in terms of hours. And just like TV shows and Books, you don't have to consume the whole thing at once.

It's funny because nowadays people talk casually about binge watching TV seasons on Netflix, but if you mention that you played a game for 5 hours straight the same people often roll their eyes.

I don't watch TV (at all) and I game maybe 4 hours a week, usually in 2 sittings.

(I will occasionally watch a DVD, but maybe 2 hours a month, max.)

When people give me grief that I play the games, I tell them I'm a software developer: it's like a writer reading books.

>I find them no more addictive than books or TV //

They're entirely different in many respects but no book nor TV show is essentially endless as a MMORPG is. If I spent 12 hours a day reading a novel I'd have finished it inside 2 days, similarly for watching many TV series. Yet I could spend 12 hours a day every day playing a game and continue until ... some external factor intervenes.

Books and TV shows don't have the same "reward" mechanisms (think Skinner box) they don't really relate as an experience other than that all 3 media usually involve a narrative of some form. Games feel like you're doing something worthwhile beyond sitting and consuming media as you do for a novel or TV drama; they give an illusion of achievement [often one carefully psychologically tailored to engage and retain the user as much as possible] that compels in a way other media do not.

It obviously depends on the game or TV show. I suppose if you were "addicted" to news you could watch cable news 12 hours a day ad infinitum.

Again, I can only relate personal experiences, but I've been just as compelled to read "just one more chapter" of certain books or to watch "just one more episode" of a TV series as I have to advance in a game.

I enjoy all three mediums and at different times in my life I've been into one more than the others. They all seem more or less the same to me (in terms of time spent, culture absorbed, entertainment value).

Depression ruined your friend's life, not Team Fortress 2.

Note how Football Manager 2014 dominates both the Mean/Median "number of hours played per owner" charts, but doesn't register on the "Most played games" charts. This seems to indicate this game is the most successful at hooking it's players, but not the most successful at reaching large numbers of players. Not really surprising, but I find the implications interesting: A game such as this (and perhaps this can be applied to non-game contexts) is going to benefit mostly from some way of deriving revenue per time spent, rather than revenue per unit sold. Put another way, player reach is low but player investment is high. Golden opportunity for microtransactions? How about something radical, like the game is free for the first 20 hours, but each hour played after that costs $0.01 (pulling numbers out of my ass here, but you get the concept)

this game is the most successful at hooking it's players, but not the most successful at reaching large numbers of players

Rather than "hooking" its players, you could read it as, this game has a devoted cult/niche following. One of those things certain people love & cannot do without, yet has narrow appeal.

Kind of like snake antivenin.

And risk alienating an entrenched and fanatical fanbase?

Note the '2014' in the title; this is one of those regular sports games franchises, and it has been around since 1992 (For the first 10 years or so, it had the name 'Championship Manager', but that was changed due to legal hassle). Every year, these guys upgrade their engine, upgrade the player database, pile on some improvements and tweak stuff, and put out a new game. Some fans buy the game every year, some every two, or every three years.

It might be a niche product, but Football Manager owns that niche; it has a recognisable brand name and product (one that is well-recognised in the real-life sport itself to the extent that one Premiership Football Team - Everton - even bought early access to the player database), a large and fanatical fanbase (the company has fans in almost every football team in the world scouting players for it), and constant (if not growing) revenue stream.

Gamers aren't stupid; trying to nickel-and-dime them with those hated microtransactions is the sort of thing that would easily lead Sports Interactive down the road to an EA Dungeon Keeper-style PR nightmare. SI are already onto a very good thing; the sort of quick-buck Zynga/King style cynical disruption you're suggesting would be a total disaster.

I'd be more tempted to attribute FM2014's hours played to the style of game that it is. It's very much a "spreadsheet" game in many regards - you can leave it running in the background while it plays through the simulation of the football leagues. I know plenty of people who just leave it running while they browse the internet or watch TV. All they have to do is occasionally check on their lineups and watch through a match.

A similar piece on focusing on the most popular indie games available on Steam would be interesting as well.

Edit: Used to be 'focusing solely on the indie games'

I could never figure out what Dota is. What's the gameplay?

(I've never seen it and given I'm a Linux person it's non-trivial).

Its a MOBA/aRTS (depending on what category you want to call it), where 2 teams of 5 players control characters trying to destroy the opposing team's buildings. (more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dota_2)

There is an official Linux client but I wouldn't recommend it unless you want to lose a lot of free time as the game takes over your life. ;)

Describing it as a MOBA is probably not super helpful as its predecessor (DoTA in War3) was the predominant definer of the genre.

It's a tug of war game where there are two teams that have automated weak NPC units (creep), and the players on each team control a hero character with abilities and spells. The goal is to push the opposing team back to their base and destroy the base.

It's a five on five game where you are trying to destroy your opponents base. Each player selects a character to control, those characters grow stronger over time. The game is won by properly anticipating your opponents strategy and preventing them from anticipating yours. There is also a high skill ceiling for controlling individual units, so individual players can be a major help or hindrance to their team.

DoTA (or Defense of the Ancients) is a game belonging to the MoBA genre (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena). The games starts with 5 players on a side, each player controlling one character. Also, every team has an "ancient" which is a structure which is heavily guarded. The aim is to destroy the other teams ancient and the team doing so wins the game. However, it is not so easy to just go ahead and destroy the ancient. There is line of towers that will deal heavy damage to you on your way to their base, where the guarded ancient is. You need to level up your hero and get more gold, with which you can buy items which will give your hero damage, survivability or simply an advantage in team battles. Killing your opponents heroes from time to time is also important because if their character becomes overpowered, it'll later on be impossible for you to advance to their base or to guard your own base.

DoTA is a highly strategic game wherein you don't just take the most overpowered heroes and go ahead with the game. If everyone did that, your team is going to lose. You always pick a hero who will keep on collecting gold and levels most of the early game only to come in late game dealing a crazy amount of damage and be more or less invincible. This is called the "carry" of your team (you may have more than one carry, or a mix of carries and semi-carries). Then you have supports, whose job is to help the carry become overpowered. Their job is to give their team a strategic advantage by planting wards across the map which gives vision of certain areas of the map and buying support items, items which can heal, or disable a person of the other team, or simple give a boost to all other players within an area, which is extremely crucial in team battles. Supports are expected to not collect gold from kills or last hits, but instead give it to their carry if he is around. Each battle lasts for no more than 12-15 seconds in the extreme case and the winner is determined on a lot of factors including how the order in which the skills were used, how did a combination overpower the other heroes (for instance a skill that increases magic damage combined with a skill that deals a lot of magic damage), your knowledge of where the heroes are on the map, how you entered into the battle, etc. The items you buy also greatly depend on the heroes in your team and the heroes in another team (for ex., if the other team has a lot of people with a lot of magical skills, go ahead and buy an item that gives you magic immunity). There is no "one-size-fits-all" inventory in DoTA 2.

Team battles often become deciders of a game because their always is a huge shift of gold and exp whenever a team battle occurs. Team battles aren't pre-announced or pre-determined by the game. You are just roaming around the map, find someone and there might be a team battle, or you may strategically be roaming around the map looking for the other team to hunt them down and kill them.

PS: The last tournament which happened for this game, conducted by Valve, was 'The International 3', which had a total prize pool of 2.7 million USD.

This is a video of one of the in-game tutorials (the tutorial is rendered in-game, with the same camera perspective as a player), it does a decent job of explaining the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmRBvla8tSY

It's an RTS/RPG hybrid. A standard top down view strategy map with two opposing bases, with tiered fortifications. Each base is already generated at the beginning of a match and automatically creates computer controlled units and sends them to battle. The human player is a single hero trying to affect the outcome of that battle.

10 players make up two teams (5v5). They each begin the game as weak lvl 1 heroes. Initially the focus is on killing the computer controlled units (creeps) to gain experience and gold for items. As the hero gains levels and items they are able to do greater amounts of damage to the opposing creeps and opposing human controlled heroes. At high level heroes will destroy entire creep armies and siege base defenses. The game is won by destroying a primary building at the base of the opposing side.

What makes it fun/compelling to me.

Games are short with no character permanence. No standard RPG style grinding. Just a 30-45min RTS style chessmatch

Minimal wrote build orders. Unlike the first 10mins of most RTS matches

Controlling a single unit lessens the clickfest aspect of most RTS style games

Coordinated teamplay is vital, but this can also result in new players getting flamed mercilessly

Beginning with a full base with defenses and creeps by default prevents the standard RTS formula of rush > boom > turtle > rush. Opens up more options for gameplay and strategic depth. Dota is designed in such a way that games tend to explode rather than stalemate. Hero HP is additive, but damage is multiplicative (avoiding games that drag on despite being over).

It runs natively on linux, it's free and bugs, but not source code, are hosted on github.

I really recommend watching this http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UjZYMI1zB9s just make some popcorn before.

If you're a bit more curious but don't want to get the game and try it out, Valve made an excellent documentary [1] that gives an introduction to the game and shows why it's so incredibly compelling.

[1]: http://www.freetoplaythemovie.com/

Many of the early Valve games (HL2, CS:S, Portal, etc.) are certainly well under the proper numbers. Counter Strike: Source, at the very least, would be far higher on the list if hours before 2009 were counted.

More people own Lost Coast, an addon for Half Life 2, than Half Life 2 itself? How did that happen?

It's not an addon, it's a free tech demo of features they didn't manage to have ready for the engine at release, HDR and the like.

Lost Coast is a standalone freebie tech demo; it probably was issued freely to owners of various other Source Engine games (or maybe even just to absolutely everybody). Apparently it was also given out to people who bought certain graphics cards too.

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