On April 1st, many companies make humorous announcements and generally play tricks on their audience. GameDiscoverCo, an analytical service, also joined in and launched the Insights Lab tool, which allows users to explore various atypical statistics on Steam.
Interestingly, the data tracked by Insights Lab is entirely real. The tool simply focuses on aspects that typically go unnoticed in serious analytics, such as the anger index in reviews, the cost per minute of entertainment, the list of most popular words in game titles, and similar insights.
Below are a few intriguing observations.
- Steam has “taken” 1.3 million human lifetimes, each lasting 80 years, equivalent to the total time users have spent gaming on the platform. The highest player years were spent on Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2, accounting for 340.8 thousand and 301.8 thousand lifetimes, respectively.
- Black Mesa has the shortest description in Steam, consisting of just two words: “Relive Half-Life.”
- eFootball and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III are the most controversial games on the platform, each having exactly 50% positive and 50% negative reviews.
- One minute of entertainment in FINAL FANTASY XI: Ultimate Collection Seekers Edition typically costs gamers $10. The game is often quickly abandoned.
- Games that nobody likes (i.e., with a rating below 20%) have collectively earned $26.6 million. There are 465 such games.
- The angriest corners of Steam are games tagged “Multiplayer,” “Free to Play,” and “First-Person Shooter,” which have the highest number of negative reviews.
- Users most frequently employ profanity in reviews for games tagged “2D Fighter,” “Competitive,” and simply “Fighting.”
- For Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, each negative review corresponds to $28,300 in revenue, while for Black Ops 6, it’s $17,300 in revenue per negative review.
- In the past 24 hours, 64.8% of games on Steam have not been launched even once.
- Developers love using the word “Simulator” in their game titles—it’s the most common word in Steam titles. Other popular words include “Edition,” “Game,” “World,” “Space,” “Adventure,” and “Hentai.”