New Steam Stats Feature Discovered Ahead of Release
Another new Steam feature is apparently on the way with a discovery made this week pointing towards a "year in review" wrap-up that'll show users all sorts of interesting stats related to their playing habits. Based on what's been seen so far, this new feature is not unlike similar community-focused roundups other platforms have released. It's supposedly going to be available around the time that Steam's big winter sale kicks off, though Valve has not yet confirmed anything about this feature just yet.
Pavel Djundik, the creator of the helpful SteamDB site, found the new tool this week and tweeted out that it appeared to be a "year in review" feature. Djundik said that at the time of discovery the feature only indicated playtime and the total sessions players accumulated over the course of the year. Another tweet posted not long afterwards showed that the API already worked with proof shared in the form of an image that appeared to show Djundik's stats.
The API already works. pic.twitter.com/5i4qTxDdaR
— Pavel Djundik (@thexpaw) August 17, 2022
While "total sessions" may not seem like much on its own, the breakdown in the image is a bit more interesting. It shows things like how often people played with a controller or on a Steam Deck alongside stats for things like the operating system used to play a game. Given what we've seen from year in review features released by other platforms, we'll presumably see more trackable stats available through this feature by the time it rolls around.
And we have indeed seen others do just this sort of thing, so it's nice to see Steam getting around to it, too, assuming the info shared here does indeed point to a year in review feature as expected. PlayStation does it, Xbox has done it for a while and has continued to expand on the feature, and Nintendo does, too (Nintendo's link for the year in review page has expired).
If you're thinking this sort of feature sounds familiar already in relation to Steam, it could be because you're recalling the year in review roundup that tallies Steam's overall stats like monthly active players as opposed to individualized stats.