Steam Year in Review 2023

Another year has come and gone for the. And with it, Steam’s brought us another year in review. Or I think another. I don’t remember if they did this last year but I'm pretty sure they gave out some sort of statistics.

And I’m rather disappointed in how my year in review turned out. I thought I played a lot more than this.

To start off, 79 games in the last year. Not a very good number if I plan to complete all the games in my video game collection. The scariest part is that I know for sure I added more than 79 games over the course of 2023. And that’s just with my Humble Monthly subscription alone. 

For my top 3 games Stationeers and Space Engineers make sense. I got huge into those earlier in the year (both on servers with friends). But Eve Online was scary to see up there. I played that for about a week near the end of November and start of December. One week and it’s 10% of my total play time.

Yeah I did nothing but eat, sleep and breathe that game those few days. But in all fairness, I specialized in mining that can requir minimal input depending on what your doing. So I ran it in the background throughout the day while getting work done at my desk.

At first glance it’s a little weird seeing the medians across the steam community so low. But it’s also important to remember that not everyone plays lots of games. Most of my friends have a few select games they play and don’t vary much from them. I also couldn't find any information on if they also included dead along with active accounts.

This one was nice to see. It shows how little money I spent on new games this year. I would go so far to argue that this is probably the lowest percentage that it's been in a very very long time.

I didn't expect to see Cyberpunk as a Genre. But I think it's because of only having 79 games on this list. 79, is that really correct?

And the Space Genre makes sense. Up until this year, I didn’t realize just how much I loved space games. But I think it's also because Open World Survival Crafting games are one of my favorite styles of games. And Space is a theme you often see associated with games like that. As well as Space falls into a rather broad genre. Rimworld also takes place on a planet in the future and I believe it still falls under the category of space since it’s space related. So you could argue that space is a pretty wide and open genre.

Stationeers was a rough time for me during the year. Not emotionally or physically. Just a strong lack of productivity. I became obsessed with this game.

Believe it or not, the original plan for OffBrandSpen was to make a lot of Stationeers content. I was working on tutorials, had a content plan put together, the whole 9 yards.

But then an update came out introducing new state of change mechanics and the game went from something fun to figure out into a nightmare of trying to cope with all the changes and new found difficulties. Maybe I should look back into this again. See what all’s changed. I’m sure they’ve smoothed out a lot of its aspects by now.

Already touched briefly on this one. I believe it was running in the background for at least 14 hours each day.

I have an obsession with trading and markets in video games. The actions of buying, trading, and selling hooks me. I love learning systems, seeing what people are interested in and what they aren't. Learning how everything comes together and becomes a part of a big supply chain is exciting to me and depending on the game its fun to see how we can expand out from there.

Eve had it all for me. I got into mining, began turning the ores into ingots, and then started selling them around on the market. And it was my obsession for those 8 days that I played. I got involved with a Corp (what guilds are called in the universe) but then woke up the morning of the 9th day with no interest in it at all. I think it was the travel time that finally did it for me. Moving about the universe was really boring. There was no sense of adventure to it. Just click and wait.

There’s not too much to say about Space Engineers. I'd been going strong with it well into the end of 2022 and the start of 2023. I was playing on a server with a few friends where we'd started building out stations. A few of us were located amongst some asteroids above the earth. And the others were settling on the moon. Things were going strong for a while but then it slowly teetered off.

I think I was hoping to have some sort of conflicts or battles with the others. I wanted to build this sense of rivalry between us. But nothing really came of it. I also didn't do a very good job of telling anyone that I was interested in doing something like that. I did start playing around with some combat missions but those weren’t too exciting. I always seemed to take more damage than what I was able to pay to fix. It just wasn't worth it. But the way they delivered waves of enemies while defending a ship was a lot of fun.

Every year or 2 I come back and sink a lot of time into this. So I’m pretty sure I'll return again. Probably after another big update or DLC. Or maybe when Space Engineers 2 comes out! That's something I can hardly wait for.

Expected to see this a lot higher up. I was sure I sunk way more hours into this. I got a hankering for some farming earlier on in the year and then came back to it and started a No Mans Land playthrough. I recorded a bunch of it to turn into a video similar in style to "Starfield the Video Game the Movie" up on my YouTube channel too. I plan to come back to it. But I got a bit of work with a few other videos before I feel like I can come back to it.

There's not much to say about RimWorld. Every once in a while I get a strong urge to play a survival base management game. When that happens I'll spend a few hours scouring through steam. I usually see Satisfactory and think “not yet. Maybe after the next update” then I look through a few more and settle down with launching RimWorld back up. I play it for a few hours over a couple days and then put it off to the side usually after my favorite colonist dies.

But this time, during the process of recording stuff for the Farming Simulator video, I had an idea for a RimWorld video too and I dived head first into it. Which was what originally killed off the progress of Farming Simulator.

From there RimWorld birthed a new idea, and then that became another idea, and then I recorded and mostly edited the Starfield video, and now I have a few other videos in the works. I still have plans to come back to this one. But we’ll see what happens.

It’s a little scary to see how well these games from above stack up to the playtime of all the other games I played this year. 

A lot of January's games were one off plays. Apex and Human Fall Flat were for a friend's stream. Medieval Dynasty, Foundation, and Jalopy were all for some streaming that I was starting to get back into. Little Big Workshop, Grand Ages Medieval, and Dungeons 3 were from some management game cravings. I did actually play a fair bit of Going Medieval. I don't remember if that was when one of its updates came out or not though.

February was mostly Valheim and Hogwards Legacy. I was still doing some variety streaming and joined a Valheim server with some friends. I wanted to stream Hogwarts but was a little afraid to because of all the controversies related to it. So I decided to just play it solo. I still haven't finished it but man was it good. The rest was some little bits here and there but nothing too fancy. I believe grand theft auto was for a friend's YouTube video. Also Powerwash Simulator shouldn't be as good as it is. I don’t get it.

March I played the least of anything. A lot of editing was going on here for some different projects I was a part of.

April I tried a lot of different games. Most of this month consisted of Kenshi and Star Wars Battlefront. Just not the battlefront here. I saw I had access to the new one on Gamepass so I spent a lot of time playing that. I expected Noita was going to hook me. But I didn't quite get into it.

Kerbal Space Program 2 was also a disappointment. I know it’s only early access but I expected more from it. It felt way too bare bones for the $70 price tag. So I refunded that.

I don't remember much about these games. I believe No Mans Sky was the big game this month. A few years ago I was a part of a YouTube channel making web series content for No Mans Sky. We wrote our own scripts and told the stories of the characters Preck, Ness, and Tom. It was a lot of fun. I’d sunk hundreds of hours into filming stuff for the web series but had never properly played the game. So I had fun messing around in that. I want to go back and do some more there one of these days. I haven't yet because I would like to make a video about it.

Hello June. I can't say for sure which one of these I played the most. Stationeers was picked up right at the end of the month and it took off in July. I did do a fairly decent playthrough of oxygen not included. That’s one I’ve never been able to beat.

If you scroll back up to the bar graph, you will see that July had a purple spot at the top of its bar. But no games popped up for it in the most played games. I think that one’s Stellaris for sure. Actually, I'm starting to think that the games of each month go from most to least played. Starting top left and ending bottom right. That would make sense.

Stellaris is a game I consider to be one of my all time favorites. The way it blends strategy and story is magical. It makes the entire universe feel so alive. Plus you never really know how something is going to turn out. There's so many percentile chance encounters and options hidden behind decisions that you could pick the same options every time you go through the game and still come out with vastly different experiences. I would love to do a full playthrough of it with some friends one of these days. But it's a huge time investment.

I thought for sure that Kingdom Come Deliverance would be one of the most played games. I spent a lot of time going through it and still probably wasn't even half way through the game. It’s one of those games where its main character is awkward and clumsy and you don't really like him. But then as time goes on, he becomes part of the charm of the game.

I had plans to go into Good Company. I wanted to create a video playthrough of it where 2 friends worked for the same company but were competing against each other as if they were in different departments trying to outdo each other in order to impress their boss and increase their budgets. But it didn't work out too well in practice.

But seeing Farming Sim here again is having the farming cravings return.

And then there was Rimworld like I’d mentioned before. As well as this was the start of the Farming Sim video series I’d wanted to make. The rest were me looking to fill a craving for some management elements in gaming.

Almost half of the games played in November were for some sort of video or review. The rest were just casual play. I thought for sure I put more time into cyberpunk than I did Obenseuer. Strange.

And finally, the first half of December. Yeah, Eco has been my obsession this last little while. If the cut off for the steam in review wasn't the 15th of December, I think it would have easily beat out Eve Online for game time.

I also found this at the bottom of all of the steam reviews just now. This explains a lot of things. I’m not sure how accurately this all reflects my gaming habits of the year anymore.

I spend a lot of time gaming in offline mode. Honestly, it's because when friends reach out to play games and instead of just saying “nah, I'm not up for multiplayer stuff right now” I panic and say something like “Sorry, I'm not home right now” or “Unfortunately I’ve got a lot on the go right now. I really should just tell the truth about that.

I'm glad Steam spent the time to make another Steam Year in Review 2023. I hope they do this again in the future and I plan to keep my status as online this whole year to get a proper look at what my stats could have been like. I'll enjoy comparing them next year.