Steam Completion Rates

Within the PC gaming community, the prevalence of sales on the gaming platform Steam has an unfortunate side effect for users. Like many gamers, I have games which I have purchased with real money but never actually played. Typically these are titles that come bundled with other purchases, or end up being very cheap, but they sit in my Steam directory ready to be downloaded or played at any time. For many users, either due to time constraints or lack of interest, fail to ever play these titles.

Some users have seen it fit to start playing through their games. Either by alphabetically one-by-one playing through at least an hour or two on each title, or chronologically starting with the oldest game first. Because the Steam sales cut so deep into many of the titles on offer, it can be quite easy to pick up an extra game or two, just because it is an extra $2 or so.

The Steam platform has the advantage of its massive backlog of games, stretching back almost a decade, being available for sale. This was added to in the last year with Steam Greenlight which allows developers to post up games in the middle of production (typically from pre-Alpha to open-Beta stages) and allow users to purchase an unfinished product and help in development and bug fixing. These ‘Greenlit’ titles are voted on by the public, and may feature discounts up until the full game release. Either that or the developer leaves the game for dust because 10,000 people already bought it unfinished.

The only gap Steam hasn’t accessed is the app market, similar to Google Play or the Apple Store, preferring instead to market most titles as full on games rather than a click and a swipe away. Any games that do use Flash or Unity as their base stick to a full discrete loading scenario under the Steam ecosystem.

But I digress – the point here is that so many games are either unplayed or unfinished. The fact that Steam now tracks how many hours each game has been played should have been implemented when Steam first launched, and we had to resort to tools such as XFire back in the mid-2000s. Now that Steam does it, and Steam collects achievements, it also goes a way to see how popular games are not just on sales but on game time and achievement status.

Recently I have been plundering my list of games to examine which titles could be completed easily, or some of my favourite games that deserve to actually sit at 100% completion. Before I started this ‘quest’ in itself, I had a grand total of 250+ games in my Steam catalogue, with zero completions. In the past month, this has risen to 274 games, but 14 completions.

A small side note here – Steam has an odd way of collating DLC. In some games it comes up as a separate title and has a separate completion rate. For others it comes bundled into the main title. As a result, websites like http://www.achievementstats.com/ separate the two and count them as individual completions. So while Steam says 274 games / 14 completions, AchievementStats says 294 games / 22 completions. For the sake of ease, I will be using the latter.

Similar to how you can approach the Xbox 360 achievement hunt, I am going to list the games I have completed into several sections based on time to complete, or difficulty to complete. Some games are 100% completed by merely following the story mode, which is usually straightforward. Others require collectable quests, which add time, or some are just downright difficult with achievements such as ‘Complete X on hard in under 2 minutes’ or something similar.

Part of this list is also to collate some of those easier completion titles, while also adding in some of the games I love that deserve to be 100% listed, regardless of difficulty.

So here is the list from AchievementStats, starting with easy games with a brief description of time to complete and difficulty followed by my ‘must completes’:

Easy Games

A Bird Story – 1.2hrs, complete story
Actual Sunlight – 0.4hrs, complete story
Free To Play – <1hr Free ‘game’, skip to the end of videos.
Hexcells – 1-2 hrs, follow a guide
Hexcells Infinite – 1-2 hrs, follow a guide
Hexcells Plus – 1-2 hrs, follow a guide
Incredipede – 1 minute, access menus
The Plan – 5 minutes, hold ‘up’
To The Moon – 2 hours, good story
Universe Sandbox – 1-2 days, use a guide for 10000 openings

Must Completes:

Borderlands – Play through the story mode and DLC first, 30hrs+
Borderlands: Zombie Ned DLC
Borderlands: General Knoxx DLC
Borderlands: Claptrap DLC – Collection achievements require grinding
Borderlands: Mad Moxxi’s DLC – this takes 6hrs+ by itself
Borderlands 2 – Play through the story mode and DLC first, 30hrs+
Borderlands 2: Mr. Torgue DLC
Borderlands 2: Tiny Tina’s DLC
Borderlands 2: Sir Hammerlock’s DLC
Borderlands 2: Captain Scarlett’s DLC
Goat Simulator – ~10hrs, follow video guide for collectables
Road Redemption – 10-15 hours, a bit of grinding

I’m always on the lookout for easy games to complete, so if you have any suggestions let me know. There are several I have already set aside:

Imagine Me
Reversion – The Escape
The Walking Dead (Compete Story)

Aside from those, I have the following in my ‘Games To Complete’ that I want to 100% the following over time.

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel
Carmageddon: Reincarnation (waiting for achievements to work)
Final Fantasy VII (25hrs +)
Final Fantasy VIII
Final Fantasy XIII
Final Fantasy XIII-2
Saints Row 3
Saints Row 4
Torchlight (fishing achievements will take a while)
Torchlight 2

Finding accurate data on time to complete, or how many games have been completed by how many people, is actually very difficult. AchievementStats could do it, or even Steam could do it, but for whatever reason they do not. Comments are always welcome, and new games that are added to this list will be reviewed as well ! 🙂

-Ian