![[OC] I analyzed the Steam backlogs of 300 gamers. Over 50% of them are hoarding the exact same unplayed game. [2026]](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/v18vpd0xf0tg1-1536x915.png "[OC] I analyzed the Steam backlogs of 300 gamers. Over 50% of them are hoarding the exact same unplayed game. [2026]")
Source: I pulled this anonymized data from the backend of BacklogShuffle, a free web app I'm building for others randomly select games from our Steam libraries to cure decision paralysis. Tool used: Python/Matplotlib.
I thought it was pretty interesting we haven't gotten to Little Nightmares or Bioshock 2. Also seems like with enough people one can revive the Half Life Deathmatch games pretty easily.
Posted by Mobile_Masterpiece54
22 Comments
I have Little Nightmares and have played it a couple times but never even noticed until recently that I had the Enhanced Edition in my library. Wonder how many people simply don’t realize they have two versions.
Half life deathmatch is a free game(just a seperate launcher really) included with half life/2, so i dont think it should count?
lol i have both vermintide 2 and bioshock 2 unplayed
both bought recently, and i have to beat bioshock 1 first but my main game is having a great league so im on a bioshock pause
vermintide 2 i saw all the dlc and didnt want to start it enjoy it and then miss content and need to start over, some of the dlcs include characters so i am waiting until i can justify buying those
and by bought recently i mean like a month ago
Is half life death match source one of those games that has a lot of assets that are frequently used in gmod? I remember back in the day I bought and downloaded a few source games that I never played because lots of community servers used their assets lol
I think Bioshock 2 Remastered was given out for free to anyone that already owned Bioshock 2. I think that a lot of people that originally played Bioshock 2 would not be motivated to play the remasterÂ
The sample size could be so much larger…
You got BS2 for free if you bought the original, so its just people who already played it. For HF deathmatch it was bundled with HF
You should do this based on game’s current price
Wow people are really sleeping on Vermintide 2. If you were into Left 4 Dead 2 it’s just about the closest thing you can get to that nowadays
I’m pretty sure Warhammer: Vermintide 2 was given away for free.
Because I have it and I never played it. And I for sure didn’t buy it.
Do you have a way to filter out games that were given for free? That heavily skews your data in a potentially unassuming way.
I can confirm I have it, and I never played it.
Hi all, as you noted, the following things can be done to improve the chart:
1. Filter out free games that were included in bundles.
2. Include current game prices
3. Filter out enhanced versions of games. E.g lol bioshock 2 remastered as it is counted as a separate game
Thanks for the feedback. It was fun to explore!
I’ve had Deathmatch (all three versions, Source, H-L:2, and Classic) for about as long as I’ve had Steam. They’re in half of Steam profiles for a reason: Valve gave them away automatically.
My oldest licenses in my account are from:
* March 21, 2004 Half-Life Platinum Pack
* December 24th 2004 Half-Life 2 Retail Standard
* September 13th 2006 Valve Test Sub 74 (I have no idea what this is)
* December 19th 2007 The Orange Box Retail
All of which are listed as “Complimentary” because I bought their associated games in disk form and entered their keys manually. I think they used to give Deathmatch: Classic away in updates for Half-Life 1. That DM:Classic isn’t even on this board tells me y’all are late adopters or kids! 😉
tl;dr I would suspect that all of the games listed were complimentary or were free updates of already popular games, and because everyone played the game already they didn’t play the updated versions.
Kinda hard to call the half-life’s hoarding when they were bought for the full game not the deathmatch.
Vermintide I agree with (as I shamefully look at my library)
The comments in here are actually really helpful for once.
LN and VT2 were free for a bit, and the HL deathmatches are included with their games, if i’m right about that
I have over 1,5000 games in my library, and Steam lists the majority as unplayed, even though they have hundreds of hours. That’s because in the early days, I had dial up and played the majority of my games offline, and even when I had cable Internet later, I played offline to not be bothered. That resulted in a lot of my games not logging played hours. Later Steam added tracking offline play hours in order to facilitate accurate refunds, however I never revisited to play any of my old games again since I either completed them or got my play times worth. The same thing happened when they added achievements to old games. I have a crap ton of games now that have zero achievements, despite beating the games and completing everything. Luckily, if you save games from those old titles, loading up the save will unlock some of the achievements.
I also bought a lot of humble bundles for a single game I wanted, and ended up never playing the others in the bundle. My curiosity is how many weekly free games on the Epic game store are unplayed.
hl2 i got free with halflife
What does it mean to “hoard a Steam game”?
All of these were free at some point and everyone who uses steam has a valve game which I think gives you all the free stuff regardless what you get. The only game that might not make sense is little nightmares but it does make a lot of sense and its absolutely hilarious if people actually paid for it and never played it
Also another note: Steam didn’t always track hours played for older games.
For example, I just started playing Counter Strike Condition Zero Deleted Scenes again. My profile lists me of just having launched the game for the first time last week. But I definitely played through it a bit around 10 years ago when I built a new PC, and played it even earlier around 20 years ago when I first bought the game.