Every summer, it’s the same old story: Steam launches its summer sale, and millions of gamers heat up their credit cards to grab a few nuggets. Over the years, an interesting dynamic has started to take hold: many of these titles purchased at knockdown prices tend to rotting in the game libraries of players who don’t always have time to enjoy them. The phenomenon is all the more marked when a huge release, like the superb DLC ofElden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree, consumes players for very long hours.
Some see it as a form of compulsive and nauseating consumerism. Others simply enjoy collecting works to fuel their favorite hobby in the long term. “It’s not a “pile of shame”, it’s a buffet full of delicious things that you can pick from at will.”, argues for example a Reddit user. But in the end, the result is the same: every year, these are hundreds of millions flowing into the coffers of developers and Valve for games whose playtime remains stuck at zero.
Based on this observation, the PCGamesN team recently conducted a small experiment. By combing through Steam’s databases, probably using a bot specially programmed to crawler sites like SteamDB or SteamIDFinder, the media calculated the overall amount of this “pile of shame”.
And the result is simply staggering: PCGamesN estimates that in total, gamers spent… 19 billion dollars, or around 17.75 billion euros, in games they never touched ! For reference, this represents approximately 890 million years of Netflix Premium subscription, around forty Airbus A380s, or the gross domestic product (GDP) of Nicaragua.
A huge figure, but one that needs to be put into perspective.
The exact figure should, however, be taken with a pinch of salt. To begin with, these calculations are based on the base price of games, excluding any promotions or group purchases through offers like Humble Bundle. This is a very important factor, knowing that many players systematically wait for big sales to fill their library.
In addition, the authors had to rely exclusively on the players who left their profile in public access. That’s “only” 73 million players in total, or about 10% of the global playerbase. Across all of those profiles, the cumulative price of untouched games was $1.9 billion; from there, they simply extrapolated by simply multiplying by 10.
However, players with a public profile tend to be long-time members involved in the community, and they statistically tend to accumulate more games than those who prefer to keep a private profile. Therefore, the result is necessarily biased. Chances are the real figure is considerably lower — although it would still be exorbitant in any case.
And you, how much money have you invested in your “pile of shame”?
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