Let's face it – this hasn't been a news heavy couple of weeks. I've been trying to come up with ideas for articles, most of which have been scrapped with wild abandon because I felt like I was stretching that category of “news” rather thinly. However, I came up with the idea to see what people were playing over the weekend, and a good way to have a look at that is by looking at Steam. While Steam won't cover quite a bit of games (I'm pretty sure it has no clue how much I did or did not play World of Warcraft this weekend – spoiler alert: zero times), it gives a good bit of insight as to what people are playing. If you're wondering why I chose Steam over something like Raptr, I'd say that is from a totally due to the personal bias of knowing one person who uses the service regularly these days. If I knew more people using it, I'd likely see what people are playing through that service. Since I don't, let's take a look at what people played this weekend through Steam's services.

I initially looked at the list on Saturday. I had a house guest staying with me through the New Year's, so I could only give this a cursory glance. I do, however, wish that I had saved a screenshot of the list, since that 48-hour snapshot is greatly different from the current list of what was played over the weekend. The one exception is that the most played game remains the same. Let's go ahead and get that out of the way. In case you are wondering what the most played game on Steam has been over the past few days, that game is Dota 2. At one point, 835,831 players were all logged into Dota 2 together. Whether or not you're into MOBAs, I'd say that's still a pretty impressive number.

When I browsed the selection on Saturday, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Multiplayer and Day-Z were both in that top 10, which are now pretty far down the list of the Top 100 Games Played. To show I am in no way a Steam authority, I found that out of the top 100 games, I own four of them. Four. Two of those I haven't even played. I thought the original Left4Dead was also on this list, but looking again, I see it's only the second one, so I can't count that. My most played current games (although I barely played anything in the past week due to entertaining guests) have been Goat Simulator, World of Warcraft and EverQuest II. My friend's Steam name for awhile was “SorryIAmBad” and I think I might need to steal that next time I launch something through Steam. That feels far more appropriate than Vendolyn.

I'll admit that I'm kind of bummed that the Download Stats page for Steam is a snapshot of who uses what ISP and how much bandwidth was sucked by country. I was hoping it would show what was downloaded over the weekend. I couldn't be the only person gifted Steam bucks over the holidays, and part of my interest into seeing what people are playing is because I'm looking for things to spend my newly acquired digital monies on. Seeing what's popular in downloads would be nice, since we don't always hop straight into playing something we just purchased. A download is more likely, and I think that might be a neat thing to look at.

What did you play over the weekend? Did you launch it via Steam or are you like me, a super casual Steam gamer? Did you pick up anything new through one of the many Steam holiday sales recently, but haven't dove in to play it yet?