As 2025 gets closer to its end, Steam has now made its recap for 2025—dubed Steam Replay—live. The recap can be accessed through a giant banner on the home page, as well as this link, and gives us a great look at the state of PC gaming, and how the platform has been doing this year. While we don’t get too many details about the state of Steam and its users through Steam Replay, we do get a few interesting numbers, like the average number of new games that were played this year, as well as how many achievements were earned.
For instance, the median for games played throughout 2025 on Steam is just 4, which would indicate that the vast majority of players on the platforms largely stick to a few games rather than buying every major release. To go with this, the median for achievements earned is 11, which means that many players don’t tend to go achievement-hunting in games. Whether or not these achievements indicate story progress or side activities is unfortunately unknown. The median for most consecutive days played for Steam users seems to sit at 6 days.
As for which games users have been playing on Steam, around 14 percent of all play time on the platform was for games that were released in this year. In contrast, 44 percent of play time on the platform has been on games that were released between 1 and 7 years ago. Going further, 40 percent of play time was on games that were released 8 years ago or older. Around 2 percent of play time is missing from these numbers, however, which can be chalked up to margins of error.
The Steam Replay this year offers up quite a few more details, however these are for the user’s own account. Valve will likely give us a broader look at Steam’s 2025 later in the month, which will also reveal more details like how much play time on average was spent with different control schemes, as well as the number of games that were more popular on a Steam Deck.
Much like it did last year, Valve is also expected to once more release its best-sellers list for 2025. Last year, the company confirmed that games like Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, Palworld, Black Myth: Wukong, Helldivers 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 were the new releases that dominated the sales charts. There were also older games in this list, including Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring, which were in the same category.
Other titles that were listed as selling well included Enshrouded, Path of Exile 2, Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, and Hogwarts Legacy, among many others.
Looking ahead, recent rumours have indicated that Valve might be planning to release the long-awaited Half-Life 3 as a launch title for its own pre-built gaming machine—the Steam Machine. The company unveiled the gaming system alongside VR headset Steam Frame, and a brand new take on the Steam Controller last month. For more details, here is everything you need to know.
