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Steam Replay 2024: Discussion topic
Your Steam Replay for 2024 is now out!
If you're on the mobile app, hit Menu
> New & Noteworthy
> Steam Replay
Share your link (if you want to) or summarize your results. Tell us all about your most-played games, your year of gaming, and any other thoughts or highlights.
Man, every time I look at hours played it always seems to be games which I don't have a particularly strong opinion on which have bloated numbers, and the games I remember really well and have fond memories of clock in way lower.
For example, my highest play count games this year were Stormworks and Hydroneer. Honestly shocking. I forgot I even played Hydroneer this year (it was fine) and Stormworks only stuck with me because I spent so long being annoyed at it more than anything else.
Then I go down the list and stuff that barely even clockls are games like Colony ship and Drova, both of which I had a great time with and felt like I had many hours in. Apparently not!
I'm not sure how I feel about spending so much time in games I barely remember. I guess its hard to judge at the time, it's easy to identify in hindsight.
I'm on the same boat. I think some things that contribute to feeling this way is that some of those games are actually longer, and they're more of something to do to keep entertained, kind of like putting on the TV and watching whatever is on. Whereas the shorter games were much more interesting and tailored experiences. Another way to look at it from my personal perspective is that I tend to tolerate alright games hoping they get good, and get really invested in good games so I tend to go through them relatively quick.
I fell underneath a dock and got soft locked in the tutorial mission of Stormworks after already having to start over the tutorial due to some other jank. And then I refunded it, despite really loving the idea of the game. So I'm not surprised to hear about your frustration.
I'm curious about the methodology behind the spider graph. Although it claims to show "the kinds of games you spent the most time in", I wonder if its based on discrete number of titles, not weighting by play time. My highest category was action roguelike, which honestly surprised me and didn't fit the games I spent the most time with at all. I did try out a lot of random demos this year though, many of which might fit that description.
Yeah the graph doesn't make much sense to me. My highest category is just "Dwarf" because I played Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor and Boreblasters. Both of which would be more accurately described as action roguelike or vampire survivor-like.
That graph has never made sense to me in the years I've bothered checking the year in review. I too got "action roguelike" as my biggest category despite the fact that I spent the most time this year playing Fallout 76, Satisfactory and Elder Scrolls Online. I honestly can't remember the last time I earnestly played a roguelike.
They're weighted by the store tag votes as well. Someone mentioned they had an absurd amount of 'Rhythm' on their graph... It was because they played Sekiro.
I felt weird about mine too. The highest categories are automation and “open world survival craft” evenly split. Automation is spot on, since 62% of my playtime is Factorio. But open world survival craft is just as high. About 10% of my time was fallout 4, but those two categories should not be even.
No surprises here. Balatro, Celeste, and Slay the Spire livin' large. Too bad it can't capture the non-steam games I tried, even though they were added to and launched via the Steam library. A little funny/sad to see games that I tried and refunded.
edit: It doesn't have a link to my 2023 recap but it does for 2022. Anyone know how I can dig that up?
edit2: nvm, seems this is a somewhat common issue, and someone in the comments of the announcement page pointed out the year is in the URL and I can just switch the 2024 to 2023 to get it.
Wow this is probably the first time in a decade that Europa Universalis 4 isn’t in my top two games (usually neck and neck with whatever that year’s football manager is). After nearly two thousand hours in EU4 over the years I’ve moved on to completely different games:
Football Manager 2024
Crusader Kings 3
Victoria 3
lol but for real though I feel almost sad. Just so weird seeing this without that game right at the top. Hope EU5 hooks me the same way when it comes out in a year or two.
Edit: on further inspection seems like it was pretty much a tie for second place. 24% playtime for FM, 13% for CK3, then 12% for Vic 3 and EU4 with Victoria barely edging it out since I’ve been playing it a lot lately. Can you tell I like strategy games?
Yup, here we go.
Star Wars KotOR 1&2 in January and February, then 200 hours of Witcher 3, mixed in is American Truck Simulator throughout the year where I drive Rubber Duck's truck (from movie Convoy) and it seems there's no pickup of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order in November (20 hours) and none of Jagged Aliance 3 that I play now (30 hours so far).
All the other games are one time play or tryout or a just a few hours. The summary shows how I get the time to play - using Steam Deck playing for a few minutes here and a few minutes there with longest sessions being in the evening when kids go to sleep.
EDIT: I think.I should write a bit more than just repeat what the summary says.
Since I boight Siwtch Lite, I promised myself I will play just one big game at a time (ie. Witcher 3 or Zelda) and forfeit any other big games until I finish the one I'm playing.
Occasionally I start up another game to play while I'm playing this one big game, but this is just to have a bit of rest from the main game - these, say, spinoff games are not story driven and are kinda casual, not needing much attention (ie. American Truck Simulator or FTL).
I practice this gaming style for almost 5 years now and I'm more happy with my gaming than ever. At last I'm accomplishing a few things at once:
The absolutely #1 main contributor to his is portable gaming device - be it Switch Lite before or Steam Deck now. I have finished more than 95% of the games on portable device over my desktop (only Cyberpunk and Mafie DE comes to my mind right now).
You may think portable gaming isn't for you and maybe it really isn't. But it surely is the best for me.
When you open uo your Steam Deck when it arrives there is multilingual text on the paper box that say where you can enjoy your games - bed, toilet, submarine, airplane... And it doesn't lie. I play everywhere and all the time. I don't have two to eight hours everyday as I did in high school, but if I olay five minutes here, ten there and an hour or two in the evening, it quickly adds up and before you know it, you have finished the game!
There must be downsides, right? Yes, there are. And for some people those are show stoppers. The main thing is that Steam Deck (and other such PCs) won't run your games 60+ fps. If you are hardcore 60fps (or more) gang member, don't even think about buying it. If you are like me and you had kina mid-to-low PC all your life, you are used to not playing at high framerates anyway. Another thing is battery life that ranges from one hour to more than five depending in the game, for example Darkest Dungeon is absolute killer that jus sips the power from the battery and will last you maybe even uo to the 8 hourson OG Steam Deck (and it is great game from what I heard and read). On the other hand if you go unhinged in Cyberpunk or Shadow of the Tombr Raider, battery will be dead in an hour. But you can compromise a bit and make it last maybe two hours if you are ok with lower details (which still looks good on small screen) and 30fps locked.
And specially on Steam Deck forget about some (many? all? can't say, I don't play such) games with anti-cheat.
So if you look at my summary and think "This dude should get a life" my answer to you is that I have great life and all the achievements, games, sessions and all are onky thanks to the way I play - anytime I have a few minutes of free time.
40 games played (30 new)
556 achievments unlocked (51 rare)
Top games by time spent: Islands of Insight, The Talos Principle 2, Dungeons of Hinterberg (does not include FF7 Rebirth of course)
Spider graph most to least: Puzzle platformer, Metroidvania, VR, Action Roguelike, Tabletop, Robots (?)
Beat Saber was played throughout the year.
54% of my playtime was with a controller, including on Tchia, Biomorph, Eastward, Supraland Six Inches Under (all reviewed here I think).
Regrets: 0!
Eh I've shared my link last year before so here's mine!
https://s.team/y24/jnbgttm?l=english
I love that Slay the Spire is still in my 1 spot considering ive done everything there is to do in the game at this point but I can't stop going back. Probably also spurred by the fact that I was showing new people how to play the board game around that time.
Eager to hear your thoughts on Metaphor so far.
I liked it a lot! I'm a big fan of Persona 5 Royal and also played Persona 3 Reload earlier this year and I think it feels like a good next step from that formula. I really loved the class/archetype system a lot and also had a great time going through the story. The metaphors are definitely very heavy handed, and I really liked the way it went. Feels a bit apt in these times in America too lol.
I don't think a heavy handed metaphor detracts from the story either, I think it gives it a bit less wiggle room for misinterpretation, while also allowing the writers to explore more deeply in certain aspects of their writing.
Purposefully keeping everything vague to avoid spoilers, but I finished it in about 80 hours if I remember correctly!
I'd like to play it, mostly because I love that Sega and Atlus are still kicking out heavy hitters. That said, I've never played a Persona game. Maybe this is a good place to begin?
I'd say so! I haven't been able to check though but I'm guessing the Steam sale has put P5R on around $20 which might be the best place to start just for price point purposes. Id say you could start on any of the newer ones and work backwards from there just gotta keep in mind the newer ones have some QoL updates that's all.
Metaphor has a slightly different combat system but largely the same as the Persona games, I'd say metaphor is a bit more tactical in that regard!
Since you didn't mention it, I feel obligated to say Persona 4 Golden is an absolutely fantastic game with an almost perfect cast. Maybe the game will get a remake, but I haven't heard any rumors yet. The graphics are completely fine, and the gameplay loop is just as tight!
I only haven't mentioned it because I haven't finished it yet! I've been slowly working through it, I do like the cast a lot but I've just been so busy
Stardew Valley, Satisfactory & Red dead 2 are my top 3, and I want to say last year it was Stardew Valley, Factorio & Red dead 2. SDV the wife and I play religiously and 1.6 was just amazing, as was playing the game again not modded to hell and back again. Probably my favorite game of all time, as an adult with limited time and too much stress its just such a calm experience (I say that as if I don't play to min/max the shit out of things, but still...). Satisfactory scratched the logic puzzle itch, a bit of a pain to build in but awesome none the less. RDR2 I finished last year, a masterpiece of a game for sure, but I was playing it an old arse PC with a 1070 - After getting a big upgrade Ive been playing back though with everything at ultra. Holy hell what a great looking game.
Also of note, the Steam median for games play is only 4?! I had 28 this year and felt like I didn't play that many new or different games.
Three of the five top controller games in my Replay list don't have controller support. That's a testament to the use I get from Steam Input.
I wish someone at Valve cared about Steam Input and the people who use it, because it's actually pretty important, and there are a lot of painfully ignored issues.
Here's my 2024 review.
The game I played the most (at least via Steam) was Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy at 301hrs (a lot of that is AFK time). As the name suggests, it's a collection of three games. I've played all these before on the DS/3DS, so I thought it'd take me a month or two to get through them all. Nope. Literally took me til Dec 1 to finish, even though I played it every month.
In reality, the game I probably played the most is FFXIV, but I don't use the Steam client. I've had an account since 1.0, so I've always used the non-Steam client. I don't want to know how many hours I've put in to FFXIV this year.
44% of my playtime this year was devoted to 2024 games. Unusual, given that I tend to play a lot of games that have been out for awhile. In 2023, only 7% of my playtime was with games released in 2023. Back to this year, that's because of Ace Attorney and Helldivers 2. The latter I only bought in September. Though the original Ace Attorney games came out years ago. So it's only technically a game that came out this year.
Altogether, played 44 games this year, up from 37 in 2023, but down from 46 in 2022. And I even did the Tildes Backlog Burner last month. Hmm.
59% of gaming was on Windows, 40% on Steam Deck, and MacOS hanging in there with 1% of total playtime. Need to do more gaming on my MBP apparently.
I played 69 games, nice. Here are my stats. As you can see, I played a fuckton of destiny 2 when The Final Shape came out and a fuck ton of Call of Duty when Black Ops 6 came out, lol.
So, my most played game was Forza Horizon 4 with 46.1 hours, apparently 9% of my gaming for the year. Back of the napkin math says that's 513 hours... Disappointingly low all things considered.
But I managed to play 117 games (57 new) with 55% of that time being on my Steam Deck. So I got that going for me.
Mine is interesting to me
Early year I was coming down from Starfield in June, picking away at maxing out my character before Shattered Space landed, picked BG3 back up, got way into Vampire Survivors, and got most of the way through Portal Revolution. The system metrics don't really track because I see nearly half of my playtime on Windows, but I've been using Linux near-exclusively since February, but Geforce Now since August, which may be why.
The metrics seem right, at least.
Pretty boring, but that's new dad life for ya. Lots of gaming with the buddies
https://s.team/y24/vdmwrcm?l=english
lmao "dwarf" made it to one of the categories on my spider graph from just how much dwarf fortress I play.
evidently, nearly a quarter of my playtime (22%) was No Man's Sky, which also tracks with the "space" category in the spider graph lol.
After that, my top five games were enshrouded, coral island, stardew valley, opus magnum, and immortal life (filling out the other side of the spider graph with "farming sim lmao")
honorable spider graph mentions are "programming" and "cats" from the zachtronics and devcats games respectively
what im saying is that my spider graph is a trapezoid and i clearly have a type when it comes to video games lol