To the surprise of absolutely no one, it appears that 2024 was an absolutely abysmal year for the AAA video game industry, as a new Steam data point has revealed the shocking reality that very, very few players are interested in playing modern titles.
Every year, Valve provides Steam players with their own very own ‘Steam Replay’, an annual review of their personal platform usage which reveals a variety of statistics such as how many total games they played, how many achievements they unlocked, and which game they spent the most time in.
Another such statistic that the Replay tracks is how much of one’s time was spent playing new (released in 2024), recent (released with the last 1-7 years) and classic (released in the last 8 years) games.
In presenting this information, Steam also provides players with the platform’s average, thus allowing them to compare and contrast their own performance with other players’.
And this year, as noted on every personalized Replay page, it appears that across the entire global platform, players spent 47% of their total playtime engaging with ‘Recent’ games, 37% with ‘Classic’ games, and only 15% with ‘New’ games released in 2024 – a noted improvement from 2023’s absolutely terrible 9%, but still falling below 2022’s 17%.
Admittedly, these statistics are slanted due to many of Steam’s most popular titles are still active live-service and/or multiplayer titles like Counter-Strike, DOTA2, and Grand Theft Auto V.
It’s also worth noting that the high prices of new games, which can range from $70 for a given barebones edition to upwards of $100 for a full experience, especially during such a moment of worldwide economic uncertainty, has also had an impact on players’ preferences.
Yet, regardless, the numbers still reveal the stark reality that players are showing less and less interest in newer AAA games. And with most offerings being filled with questionable character designs, art styles, bugs, and ‘modern audience’ writing, and focusing more on pushing political and social narratives than delivering actual entertainment and escapism – just look at Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Star Wars: Outlaws, Concord, or Dragon Age: The Veilguard – who can blame them?
Of course, not everything is bleak in the modern gaming era, with even 2024 delivering a few standout titles.
For example, there’s the Chinese sensation Black Myth: Wukong. Developed by Game Science, the action RPG hit a record concurrent Steam player count of more than 2.4 million, the best such numbers for a single-player game and second best overall behind PUBG: Battlegrounds‘ all-time peak of 3.2 million.
Another gem was Pocketpair’s Palworld, which saw a peak player count of 2.1 million as players flocked to its open-world monster-hunting mechanics, many of them seeking an upgrade to Nintendo’s stale Pokémon outings.
And if those numbers weren’t enough to convince one of the game’s success, Palworld has since gone on to see a patent infringement lawsuit from Nintendo and an official collaboration with Terraria.
Further, coming in right under the wire for the 2024 calendar year was Marvel Rivals, the newly-launched Marvel Comics-themed hero shooter from NetEase.
Filled with fresh takes on the genre’s gameplay, a roster of well-translated and recognizable characters, and a vibrant art style that treats both its environments and character models with the utmost care to the source material, Marvel Rivals has spent the twenty-two days since its release firmly planted in Steam’s Top 10 most played games with a regular player count over 200,000.
Of course, these examples (which, interestingly enough, all come from East Asian developers) are the exceptions rather than the rule.
At the end of the day (or year), the numbers ultimately show that players are just simply uninterested in what the video game industry’s ‘biggest names’ are putting out – and considering the enormous budget they’re giving their flops, said studios may need to do a massive course correction or otherwise face the possibility of closing their doors for good.