The math of non-game “shame” on Steam is way off – and there’s no reason to feel guilty

Gaming news site PCGamesN has a SteamIDFinder web tool that can do a nice trick. If you buy PC games on Steam and have your user profile set to make your game data public, you can enter your numeric user ID into it and see a bunch of stats. One set of statistics is devoted to the total value of games listed as unplayed; you can share this page as an image linking to your “Pile of Shame”, which includes the total “value” of your Steam collection and unplayed games.

Using data from what it claims are roughly 10 percent of the 73 million Steam accounts in its database set to public, PCGamesN extrapolates $1.9 billion in unplayed games, multiplies that by 10, and casually suggests $19 billion is hanging around in unplayed games. That’s “more than the gross national product of Nicaragua, Niger, Chad or Mauritius,” the site says.

That’s a very loose “$19 billion”

“Multiply by 10” is already a pretty soft science, but the numbers are worth digging further. For starters, SteamIDFinder uses the current sale price of every game in your unplayed library, as confirmed by looking at half a dozen “Pile of Shame” profiles. An informal survey of Ars Technica associates and friends with major Steam libraries suggests that games purchased at full price make up a tiny fraction of the games in our backlog. Games acquired through bundles like the Humble Bundle, or during one of Steam’s annual or one-off sales, are a big part of most people’s Steam catalogs in my opinion.

Then there’s what counts as “Unplayed”. Clicking on the filter tool next to my Steam library and selecting “Unplayed” shows that I have 54 titles out of a total of 173 that I’ve never cracked. My own manual count of my library is close to 45. Steam and I disagree on whether I started and played Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition (I definitely did and I was definitely impressed), Mountain, and SteamWorld Dig. And Steam definitely doesn’t count games that you buy through Steam, modify in some way, and then run directly through a Windows executable. I’m sure I’ve played some TIE Fighter: Total Conversion, just not through Valve channels. One Ars editor played Half life 2 several times between 2004-2007, but Steam says they never played it because it didn’t start counting game hours until March 2009.

While not dedicated tools, Steam libraries sometimes end up with little bits of games you didn’t ask for and might never play, e.g. Half-Life Deathmatch: Source. I have quite a few Star Wars games that I never intend to run because they were part of the bundle that got me Jedi Knight and Outcast Jedi for less than both games would cost separately.

What “shame” really looks like.

Curious to see what the backlog looked like, I asked friends and coworkers to run their own numbers after checking for bugs and oddities. Here is the Ars list:

• Kevin Purdy: 173 games, 45 not played (26 percent)
• Lee Hutchinson: 361 games, 109 not played (30 percent)
• Benj Edwards: 404 games, 148 not played (36.6 percent)
• Andrew Cunningham: 172 games, 79 not played (46 percent)

Friends who did the checking ended up at 25 percent, 40 percent, and 52 percent. So no one I could easily reach had less than 25 percent of their games unplayed, and those with higher numbers tended to buy packs, sales, add-ons, and other input generators. And no one thought their total dollar value made sense when considering the full price.

In 2014, Kyle Orland went deep into Steam statistics. Among games released since Steam began tracking hours in March 2009, 26 percent were never played during that time, while another 19 percent were only played for an hour or less. That’s roughly 45 percent of the games that were played for what was essentially a token amount of time.

There’s also a much more serious argument here: You don’t have to be “ashamed” of giving too much money to people who make games, especially smaller games, if you don’t want to. This goes for an even broader understanding of “Unplayed”, such as checking an introductory level or two. Sometimes playing a game for a while and deciding it’s not something you want to commit dozens of hours to is worth it, whether you opt for a refund or not.

If you’ve looked up your own stats and feel surprised, you can keep your unplayed games as a dedicated collection on Steam and it might inspire you to check out the most interesting lefts. Or, like me, filter this list further by Steam Deck-verified games and take them on your next trip.

You can usually earn extra money more easily than extra life. No one will inherit your Steam library (probably), so it’s not worth anything anyway. Play what you’re interested in when you have the time, and if the number of unplayed matches helps you steer clear of the worst impulse buys or rediscover lost gems, so be it. There are neat tricks, but no real math—and no real shame.