Steam Replay 2025: Why CS2 and Dota 2 Still Dominate Over New Hits

Valve has officially released its annual "Steam Replay" for 2025, offering millions of users a personalized summary of their gaming year. While the feature is designed to highlight individual habits, the aggregated data points to a broader industry trend. Despite a record-breaking flood of fresh content, PC gamers are overwhelmingly choosing to stick with established, older titles rather than new releases. The most telling statistic from this year’s report reveals that only 14% of total playtime on Steam was spent on games released in 2025. 

This figure stands in stark contrast to the sheer volume of content available, with over 19395 new games hitting the storefront this year alone. To ensure these numbers reflect genuine engagement, Valve’s analysis excludes fully inactive accounts. 

When looking at the median user, who played a total of just four games throughout the entire year, this percentage translates to a theoretical 0.56 new games played per person. In simpler terms, the typical Steam user may not have played a single newly released game from start to finish in 2025, preferring instead to rotate through a small selection of familiar titles.

The Rise of 'Forever Games' and Backlog Loyalty

This preference for "forever games" over new launches appears to be a stabilizing trend rather than a one-off anomaly. Historical data shows that playtime for new releases has hovered around a reliable annual average of 15% recently. The figure sat at 17% in 2022, dipped to 9% in 2023, and returned to 15% in 2024. 

With 2025 settling at 14%, it suggests that even amidst industry turbulence, including mass layoffs and a saturation of live-service titles, player behaviour remains remarkably consistent. The competition for attention is fiercer than ever, yet the vast majority of engagement remains locked in older experiences.

According to TweakTown, the data further breaks down exactly where player time is going, showing a massive preference for backlog titles and multiplayer giants. Games released between one and seven years ago accounted for 44% of all playtime, while titles aged eight years or older commanded a significant 40% share. 

This latter category is dominated by enduring staples like Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and PUBG: Battlegrounds. While highly anticipated 2025 single-player releases, such as Hollow Knight: Silksong, saw peaks in player counts, they generally struggled to generate the sustained engagement commanded by these older service games.

Beyond playtime distribution, the Replay edition offered additional insights into user engagement and hardware. These figures paint a picture of a user base that is far less experimental than online discourse often suggests. 

Ultimately, the narrative of 2025 is one of loyalty over novelty, where a massive library of 19395 new options could not sway the average gamer from their established favourites.