Condensing Steam: Distilling the Diversity of Gamer Behavior

We present a comprehensive measurement study of the Steam gaming network, the first complete examination of any major gaming network, comprising all 108.7 million user accounts and 384.3 million owned games. We examine gamer behavior across the dimensions of social connectivity, playtime, game ownership, genre affinity, and monetary expenditure. As a whole, gamer behavior is highly diverse and characterized by heavy-tailed distributions. Most players exhibit modest behaviors in terms of the number of minutes played per day and the amount of money spent on games, though there is a long tail withoutliers, such as gamers who maximize achievements or playtime stats, or gamers who collect games they don't play. We find some strong correlations that show that players tend to befriend those who are similar in terms of popularity, playtime, money spent, and games owned. We collect a second snapshot of the Steam network and show that our findings are robust across both measurements. We conclude by relating these findings to other relevant studies, including gamer stereotypes, game addiction, and social networking.