My gaming behaviours, visualised

Created on Monday, January 6, 2014.
Filed under Miscellaneous.
 

I downloaded all of my Steam data and crunched it to figure out how I buy and play games.

 

There’s a tool called Steam Gauge that gives you a readout of how much your Steam account is worth, how much time you’ve spent playing particular games, and so on. I noticed that Steam Gauge lets me download all my data as a spreadsheet, so I just had to play around with it. I found some pretty cool information about my preferences and behaviours (n = 686 games):


I tend to buy games when they’’re priced at US$10–20.


Most of my play time is in Action games

Action is my umbrella category for games mostly revolving around combat or reflexive play, be they FPS or beat-em-ups.


I play individual games in the RPG and Simulation genres for longer.

The total game time graph above is skewed by the fact that I own lots of Action games, not necessarily that I play them for a very long time. When I take the number of games in each genre into account, it becomes apparent that I play individual games in the RPG and Simulation genres for longer periods.


I’ll get more play time for my money if I buy Simulation games.

And finally, this is how much an hour of play would cost me per genre, adjusted for the prices of the games themselves. I play sims much longer than casual games, for example, so each Dollar I spend on a sim gets me twice as much play time as a Dollar spent on a casual game, even considering that casual games are often cheaper than sims.

That's all there is, there isn't any more.
© Desi Quintans, 2002 – 2022.