My Steam Replay – 2022

Steam just released a new feature much in line with what other platforms have been doing at the end of the year: Steam Replay.

This is essentially a summary of games you played, stats on how much you’ve played them per month, and even percentages in regard to how much of your playtime has been spent with one specific game. Pretty nifty.

If you want to check it out for yourself, you can do so over here on this page (also located on the Store Page if you scroll down a bunch) – as for mine, you can dive deep into my library’s stats over here.

Note: The stats only reflect games played online and not stuff that you played in offline mode/while disconnected from the internet.
Also, programs such as Krita and VTube Studio or whatever are not shown either… also the Replay doesn’t show anything played before January 1’s first second and after December 14th’s last second (GMT).

It appears that this year my most-played games were (apparently) Risk of Rain 2, Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel, and Vampire Survivors… but it doesn’t really feel accurate in my opinion… I really don’t think I’ve played that much of them at all but I’m quite mistaken:

• I only started playing Yu-Gi-oh! Master Duel this year and amassed 61.2 hours of gameplay in that time… before I ended up quitting completely.
  • 97% of my playtime happened in March… and then I just didn’t play it again until December where I briefly started it up only to then realise why I quit it, hence uninstalling it.
• I did play a lot of Risk of Rain 2 and this year, I even finally got all the achievements for it back in April.
  • Back in March, Survivors of the Void released, so I spent 37% of my total Risk of Rain 2 playtime at that point and 26% of my playtime in April with the game, still.
  • I then played a little of it from August until October again… and recently I’ve been wanting to play it with friends again but time management has been rough.
• As for Vampire Survivors, the page asks me how much time I “spent standing still with max garlic”… and to be fair, that’s quite accurate.
  • I spent 21% of my playtime in January, which makes sense as it released in December 2021 in Early Access and I only discovered it later in January for myself.
  • Then, I didn’t play it again until May when I spent 37% of my 40-ish hours playing the game again.
  • I played it some more in June (8%), July (18%) and August (3%).
  • Then I took another break until I got back into it in preparation for the DLC in November (6%) and December (11%).
  • Lately, I’ve been playing it as well on mobile which is… interesting. There may be a post idea here for Early 2022.

The confusing bit of these stats is that that overview (see picture above) shows you the percentage of your total playtime. So, I spent 7% of my whole playtime on Steam in 2022 playing Risk of Rain 2. It doesn’t show me how many hours I played this year… although I’d imagine it’s near a hundred-ish, given that I already was sitting at around 160 hours in 2021, as I mention in some post…

But the stats for the games also say “X% of Total Playtime” at the top… but then the graphs show bigger percentages. Hence, I’d think that I spent 32% of my time in May playing Vampire Survivors… but that’s not what this graph is about… The Graph is about the percentage of this year’s Vampire Survivors playtime broken up into graphs that add up to 100%. So, this could need some clarification. I like how it’s also telling me the individual sessions I played (as in: Started up the game and closed it… 22 times).

There is also a streak counter but I don’t really have much time (sounds weird, eh?) to play a game every day. Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of Legends of Runeterra but I generally end up just playing one or two rounds per day… during breaks, so my sessions-stat would be quite high over there and so would the streak be… but the playtime is probably relatively low.

Anyway, I found this graph quite interesting as it sort of shows how I got back into it again after I wanted to check out the updates… and then I played all of the update… and then I stopped… and then I started playing it again.

It’s a common habit of mine, I think.

With Risk of Rain 2, you can see that I played a lot again in anticipation for the new expansion and then I stopped for a while when the new semester began… at which point, I played more Vampire Survivors since the rounds are much quicker… and then I played more Risk of Rain 2 again during my semester break until October.

It’s sort of hilarious.

As you can see over here, I played a total of 148 different games. A lot of which were Indie… Uhm… “just play one per cent of Indie games that come out this year” or something.

Anyway, 97 of those were new games. I also played 80 demos and I apparently participated in one playtest (post on that one soon) but that’s not exactly correct as I also was part of the Weird West playtest this year, for which I had to sign an NDA… but since it’s released that doesn’t apply anymore. Otherwise, I would have written about it. I also participated in another playtest but that one still has to release and I’m still under NDA for that.

I think the issue here is that Steam only counts the “playtests” for games that use the public playtest feature. If I got a playtest-key for something then that one wouldn’t count as Steam doesn’t count keys for games that are unreleased.

Either way, 80 demos?! Woah!

When stacked against the rest of the Steam Community, I apparently got a lot more achievements than the average, I played more games and I had longer streaks. This shows me that I spend too much time playing games. I think that’s what Steam is trying to tell me here… Instead of playing so many, I should play less… or something. Am I reading that correctly?

What I love about the Steam Replay is the breakdown into “new” and “classic” games. 2% of the games I played were more than 8 years ago (Issac, for instance, or MidBoss… and others) whereas 61% of the games I played were new releases (with the increase in review keys, that’s understandable, I reckon).

Naturally, the average Steam player isn’t able to play that many new games, so they spend more time with years that released in the past 1-7 years instead of spending so much time on newer titles.

And I wouldn’t have thought that the percentage of games the average player on Steam plays for games that released 8+ years ago would be this high. I guess there are a lot of Skyrim players, for instance… and they still discover new secrets and stuff to this day. Certain players are very passionate about their favourite games and classics like Borderlands 2 or Isaac, so that makes a lot of sense to me, I think.

But at the same time, I’m chugging away at my backlog. I played a lot of Devil May Cry this year, from the first to the third… some Dark Souls, a lot of Isaac, some Skyrim, and other titles… I’m surprised that my total percentage of “Classic Games” is this low.

Over the course of 2022, I played mostly Action Roguelikes (figures) and Colony Sims, I guess? I don’t know what games are tagged as “Open World Survival Craft” apart from ARK (which I played for a while) but I guess that’s cool? Idk. I’m surprised that the “Roguelike Deckbuilder” tag is so tiny in comparison, especially considering how much time I spent on Monster Train again this year and even Slay the Spire: Downfall! And as for “Wholesome” and “Capitalism”… Recettear.

Apart from that, I took 1337 screenshots this year (and 40 others), so I’m pretty darn elite, I guess.

I subscribed to 57 workshop items… which may have been the Slay the Spire mods that I tried and Wallpaper Enginge stuff… and maybe some Krita stuff… not sure.

And I only wrote 4 reviews as it doesn’t count my curator page, sadly. Oh well.

In October and November, I played a lot of DEATHLOOP btw… Across 15 sessions, it took me a total of 32.7 hours to get through the game. I last played it on November 8th and got 33 out of 58 achievements.

I had my issues with the game but I did enjoy it near the end… quite a bit… especially when it was over.

And then there’s ARK – a game that I alluded to already. A friend started a server, so I ended up joining that… in June, I couldn’t get it to work at all, especially with my internet issues. But then, I ended up playing 93% of my 29 hours in July… and then I stopped because everyone stopped.

Oh, and here’s my playtime by month.

• In January, I spent only 7% of my total playtime. 9% of that time was spent in Vampire Survivors. The other 91% were spent in XCOM 2, Isaac, Dead By Daylight, Stardew Valley, Moonlighter, House Flipper, Slime Rancher and 17 more games.
• In February I spent 9% of my total time. Of that time, I spent 24% playing Hades, 9% playing Risk of Rain 2, and the remaining 67% were spent in Path of Exile, Moonlighter, Per Aspera, Weird West, Aquamarine, and 36 other games.
• In March, I spent 13% of my total playtime, probably because the semester was over and I was done with exams. 4% of that time was spent playing Hades, 39% was in Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel, 21% in Risk of Rain 2 and the remaining 36% of that time were spent playing games like XCOM2, RimWorld, Hardspace: Shipbreaker, ANNO: Mutationem, Core Keeper, Onde, and two others.
• In April, I spent 9% of my total playtime, 21% of which was spent playing Risk of Rain 2 and 79% of which was spent playing Euro Truck Sim 2, Devil May Cry HD Collection, Slay the Spire, I Am Overburdened, Despotism 3k, Cultist Simulator, Himno, and 12 others.
• 7% of this year’s playtime was spent in May, 14% of that time in Vampire Survivors. The rest was spent playing Euro Truck Sim 2, DBD, DMC, StS, Hardspace, and Life is Strange!

• Back in June, I spent another 9% of my total playtime, 21% of which were spent in Life is Strange (Pride Month, wohoo) during my Charity Stream at the time… and I also played Tacoma, ARK, DBD, Deadbolt, Isaac, and… Grim Dawn with Blockade. We may have done only one play session together but I still fondly remember the chats we had and how Blockade taught me the game and stuff. It was a great time!
• In July, I played more ARK (26%),… and the rest of the time was spent playing DMC, Dicey Dungeons, Hollow Knight and even GWENT – a game that I have to play more of.
• August was much of the same. I played 15% Hardspace Shipberaker, 6% Risk of Rain 2, and then I got back into Deep Rock Galactic, Rain World, and a bunch of indies for Blaugust… not to mention that I also played through Cult of the Lamb which was pretty okay.
• In September, I got back into Risk of Rain 2 (6% of that playtime) and I also got back into Dark Souls 3, RimWorld, Terraria, Grim Nights, Nova Drift, Slay the Spire and other titles. Yay.
• November was mostly spent playing Risk of Rain 2 and DEATHLOOP… I also started playing Recettear again and even tried out more Indie Games on Stream again that I haven’t touched in a while.
• And well… This month, I didn’t play too much especially with me getting sick often and me having to prepare for exams… but I managed to beat Bugsnax – my game of the year.

At last… I use my gamepad a lot.

Like, most games I play are played with a controller, I wanna say, but in reality, that’s not the case at all. I play a lot of Roguelike Deckbuilders, after all,… and first person games… and a controller is just not great for those. Bugsnax felt better with a controller, to be honest, whereas I’d never be able to land any shots in Risk of Rain 2 if I played with a gamepad.

If you wanna dive deeper into my stats and games played, do so over here.

As always, thanks for reading this far. What was your Steam Replay like and what is something that surprised you about your year in gaming?

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!