Skip to main content

Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy.

Only 25% finished HL2 Ep1

Bizarre. Valve releases stats.

Valve has released statistics demonstrating how much time's been spent playing Half-Life 2: Episode 1, the nature of the game-sessions and things like how many people used the option to listen to in-game commentary.

The anonymous data, harvested using Valve's Steam game service, spans the fortnight of June 10th to 25th, and says that there were nearly 900,000 game sessions in total - although only 25 per cent of people bothered to finish the latest Half-Life episode. Come on chaps!

The average total playtime was just under three hours, Valve's stats say, while the average completion time was just over five hours. Elsewhere, we're told that nearly 70 per cent of people played it with HDR enabled. I did, until my overheating PC started bawooogahing at me and I had to resort to playing it on my laptop in a resolution that called to mind Half-Life 1 more than it did the cutting edge of PC FPS games.

Valve's also provided a few graphs and pie charts for those of you who enjoy that sort of thing - and arguably provided plenty of fuel for the debate about data collection, so feel free to get stuck into that. Weather's miserable after all.

Read this next