Report: 37% of purchased Steam games are never played

If you’ve ever felt ashamed of games you’ve picked up but never played, at least you can rest assured you aren’t alone. A study into Steam playing habits has found that more than a third of all games purchased through the service have never been loaded up even once.

An extensive Ars Technica (via GameSpot) report combed through 172 million Steam community IDs over the course of two months, and some of the results are surprising. 36.9% of purchased games have never been loaded, while another 17% have been played for less than an hour. The study credits generous Steam sales or bundling for this statistic, noting that many users go in with the best intentions of getting around to all the games they pick up on the cheap but those tend to fall by the wayside.

The statistics on the games that are most played are revealing as well. The top two are the free-to-play Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2. Paid games seem to have a higher estimated number of people who own the game but have not played it. The closest in that regard is Half-Life 2, which has nearly as many non-playing owners (3.9 million) as players (4.1 million).