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Steam Gauge: Measuring the most popular Steam games of 2014



(Update March 5: A few graphs have seen minor adjustments—2013 release Call of Duty: Ghosts was removed from the "most played" graph, and free-to-play title Dead Island: Epidemic was removed from the pay-to-own graph. The "Top 400" list has also been corrected to fix occasional row mismatches between games and developers/publishers. We regret the errors)

When we first unveiled the Steam Gauge project last April, we were tracking just over 2,700 games released on Steam to that point. Since then, the library of games on Steam has ballooned to include more than 4,400 games by our count. That's incredible acceleration for a service that until recently was satisfied to grow slowly. For context, the last 18 months have seen as many new games added to Steam as the service's first 10 years combined.

FURTHER READING


INTRODUCING STEAM GAUGE: ARS REVEALS STEAM’S MOST POPULAR GAMES
We sampled public data to estimate sales and gameplay info for every Steam game.
All of that is to say, we're long overdue to see what Steam users have been buying and playing from that new crop of games. And that means diving back into our random sampling of public Steam data to estimate sales for all the Steam games released in 2014. We'll be slicing that data a number of ways in this piece and even providing a good deal of raw data for you to slice it up yourselves at the end if you wish.
If you haven't already, please look back at our original Steam Gauge piece for a detailed explanation of how we came up with the numbers referenced here. Keep in mind, while we feel these estimates are relatively reliable, they are still estimates. These figures may not precisely match the reality reported to and by individual developers. When we've been able to compare our estimates to actual reports, we find they overwhelmingly fall within 10 percent of each other in either direction. Also remember that PC games that aren't sold or registered on Steam don't appear in this data.

Numbers reported here were measured on February 26, 2015 unless otherwise noted.

A couple of missing games

One major caveat before we dive right into the data—there's been a slight change to the methodology we used when we first debuted Steam Gauge. Back then, we were getting data by scraping public pages on SteamCommunity.com. Since then, Valve has been in touch to discuss how we were using those public data resources. After some back and forth, we are now getting similar data using Steam's public API, which puts less strain on Valve's Web interface.

On the plus side, this change has actually improved the efficiency of our data collection. Where we previously got data from up to 80 to 90,000 valid players per day, we're now studying 170-to-210,000 Steam players a day. That's over half a million in an average three-day sample. We've also revamped our code to make the collection process less susceptible to crashes and gaps when running on our Amazon EC2 instance.

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