The Steam Graveyard

Bought, launched, gone within two hours

Share of players who started the game and have less than 2 hours on it in total. Paid games only, likely bundle and giveaway copies excluded, at least 500 owners in the sample. Games that are short by design are left out: a game is ranked only if the top quarter of its players went past 5 hours.

Same ranking, games released 2018 or later

Bought and never launched

Share of owners with zero minutes played. Same filters as above. Old catalogue games dominate this list: many of them reached libraries through publisher packs and sales rather than one purchase at a time.

Never launched, games released 2018 or later

The most unlaunched copies

Counted in absolute copies instead of shares: how many unplayed copies of each game sit in every 1,000 libraries. Big sellers show up here even when most of their owners do play them. Our bundle flags catch few of the widely reviewed games that were once free to keep or sold in large packs, so read this list as copies sitting in libraries, not copies people paid full price for.

Where the backlog piles up

What bundles and giveaways do to these numbers

Earlier lists of "most unplayed Steam games" were topped by titles that had been given away for free. We flag a game as a likely bundle or giveaway copy when it is in far more libraries per Steam review than other paid games from the same release year (at least 3×), when it was a Steam free-to-keep promotion we tracked, or when at least 90% of its owners also own a bigger paid game from the same developer or publisher that most libraries don't have (a remaster granted to owners of the original, an edition upgrade, a franchise pack). Flagged games are kept out of the rankings above and listed here.

Never launched: 59.1% of flagged copies vs 24.5% of the rest.

Most-unlaunched flagged games

And the games people don't drop

Lowest share of players who quit within two hours, same filters.

Methodology

• Source: public Steam libraries collected by the imho.run crawler, which discovers profiles by walking Steam friend lists. This is not a random sample of Steam users. People found this way tend to have bigger libraries and play more than the average account, so treat the numbers as describing engaged PC players, not all of Steam.
• Sample: 113,781 libraries in 48 deterministic hash buckets of the 2,722,860 libraries we had collected. Libraries were last refreshed from Steam between May 3, 2026 and September 29, 2026.
• Excluded libraries: 14,343 libraries where every game shows 0 minutes (Steam reports 0 for everything when a user hides playtime) and 2,607 collector libraries with more than 1,000 games.
• "Never launched" means Steam reports 0 minutes of playtime. "Under 2 hours" means 1 to 119 minutes; its denominator is owners who launched the game at least once.
• Steam does not tell us when a game was bought, so a recent purchase can look unplayed. We only rank games released 2010–2025; Steam started tracking playtime in 2009, so earlier plays would show as zero.
• Only paid games are ranked (current price above zero), free-to-play titles are excluded, as are DLC, soundtracks, software and delisted apps. Each ranked game has at least 500 owners in the sample.
• Bundle and giveaway flags are heuristics, described in the section above. They will miss some giveaways and flag some games that simply sold well at a discount.
• Prices are the current Steam US list price, not what owners paid.
• Every number on this page comes from the sample; no game-level figure was estimated or written by hand. The script that produced it is in the imho.run repository (scripts/_report_steam_graveyard.py).