
Steam Gauge: Steam’s most popular games - keerthiko
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/04/introducing-steam-gauge-ars-reveals-steams-most-popular-games/2/
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jurassic
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.

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tvon
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.

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Xero
"Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted."

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withad
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/](http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/11/time-you-enjoy/).

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Xero
Interesting article. Thanks for the fact check!

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Goosey
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)

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AimHere
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.

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tareqak
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'

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guard-of-terra
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).

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jcdavis
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](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. ;)

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yincrash
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.

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xanderstrike
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.

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

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AimHere
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.

