Most Steam Players Don’t Finish Story Games, Study Finds

Buying a game and seeing it through are two very different things. We pulled Steam’s own achievement statistics for thousands of games and lined them up with store prices, review scores, tags and release dates to see how far players get.

Short version: across 100 selected story games, the median game has been finished by 33.3% of its players, about one in three. This is a median across those games, not an estimate for every Steam user. Separately, across 2,612 paid games, the median share of players with no achievements at all is 20.1%.

In the typical story game, 1 in 3 players finish

For each of 100 popular story games we picked the achievement Steam gives for simply finishing the game once, on any difficulty. We left out hard mode, speedrun and 100% achievements, and games whose endings are split into separate achievements. The median finish rate is 33.3%. Only 15% of these games have been finished by more than half of their players, and 29% by fewer than a quarter.

Counting only players who unlocked at least one achievement, the median rises to 40.9%. Even among players who clearly started, most have not reached the ending of the typical game in this group.

How many players finished these games

Share of Steam players with the plain “finished the game” achievement

73%

Resident Evil Requiemfinished the story. Achievement: Rookie Agent

58%

Resident Evil Villagefinished the story. Achievement: Great Dad

54%

The Last of Us Part IIfinished the story. Achievement: What I Had to Do

52%

Marvel's Spider-Man 2finished the story. Achievement: Heal the World

52%

Resident Evil 4finished the story (Standard or higher). Achievement: Promising Agent

36%

Diablo IVfinished the story. Achievement: Emancipation

35%

Cyberpunk 2077finished the story. Achievement: The World

32%

Days Gonefinished the story. Achievement: Days Done

23%

Hadesfinished the story. Achievement: The Family Secret

22%

The Witcher 3finished the story. Achievement: Passed the Trial

18%

Cupheadfinished the story (Normal). Achievement: Souls Saved

38%

Mass Effect 1 (Legendary Edition)finished the story. Achievement: Medal of Honor

Source: Steam global achievement and store data, October 2026RageQuit.gg

Resident Evil stands out. Requiem has been finished by 72.7% of its players already, Village by 58.3% and the Resident Evil 2 remake by 51.9%. At the other end, 21.8% of The Witcher 3 players have finished the main story, 23.3% have completed the main quest in Hades and 17.6% have beaten Cuphead on Normal.

Horror games get finished more often than RPGs

The 15 survival horror games in the study have a median finish rate of 42%, the highest of the genre groups we could compare. The 16 RPGs have a median of 20%, roughly one player in five. Genre groups come from each game’s top Steam tags, so one game can count in more than one group (most survival horror games are also tagged Horror). The groups are small, so read the gaps as a pattern rather than a precise ranking.

Call of Duty campaigns, often written off as an extra nobody plays, mostly sit at or above the median. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011) has been finished by 53.8% of its players and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) by 48.5%. The newer Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III sits at 33.3%.

Review scores show only a weak link. The 29 games rated 95% or higher by Steam users have a median finish rate of 37.4%, against 33% for the 24 games under 85%. The correlation between score and finish rate is 0.13, a weak association. We did not measure game length, so this data cannot say how much length explains.

In the typical game, 1 in 5 players have zero achievements

The second part of the study covers every paid game in our data with at least 1,000 Steam reviews and five or more achievements: 2,612 games. For each game we took the share of players who have not unlocked even its most common achievement. The median across those games is 20.1%. In 36% of the games it is 30% or more, and in 16% it is over half. This is a figure per game, not a count of individual Steam players.

Release year shows the clearest pattern. For games released in 2012 the median is 33.6% (57 games). For 2020 releases it is 22.7%, for 2024 14.8% and for 2026 releases 8.6% (217 games). The longer a game has been on sale, the larger the share of players with no achievements. One plausible reason is years of discounts, bundles and gifts adding copies to libraries, but this data cannot show the cause.

Which genres get started

Souls-likes (8.9% across 58 games) and Metroidvanias (9.7%, 39 games) have the lowest share of players with zero achievements. Sports games (37.7%, 65 games), fighting games (32%, 52) and shooters (31.2%, 111) have the highest. Part of that gap is design: the easiest achievement in a sports or fighting game often needs a match won rather than a tutorial finished.

Full price games have the lowest share. Games with a full price of $40 or more have a median of 16.3% of players with no achievements (357 games), against 21.9% for games priced $10 to $19 and 21.1% for $20 to $39.

How far players get in some of Steam’s biggest games

How far players get in Steam’s biggest games

Share of Steam players who never got this far

39.8%The Witcher 3of players have not unlocked Lilac and Gooseberries, the first story achievement

37.4%Stardew Valleyof players have not earned their first 15,000 gold

25%Elden Ringof players never reached Roundtable Hold

23.3%Hollow Knightof players never picked up their first charm

18.2%Hadesof players never cleared Tartarus, the first area

11.6%Cyberpunk 2077of players have not unlocked The Fool, the first story achievement

11%Baldur's Gate 3of players never escaped the nautiloid at the very start

7.8%Hogwarts Legacyof players have not unlocked the Sorting Ceremony achievement

2.3%Black Myth: Wukongof players have no achievement at all, one of the lowest figures for a big game

Source: Steam global achievement and store data, October 2026RageQuit.gg

How we did it

All figures come from Steam itself: the global achievement percentages Steam publishes for every game, plus store prices, user review counts, tags and release dates. The data was collected by our player count tracker in October 2026.

• Finish rates: 100 popular story games where we could identify one plain ‘finished the game’ achievement by its description. We checked every pick by hand and left out games where fewer than 35% of players have even the easiest Steam achievement, since those games mostly track achievements outside Steam. Where the only finishing achievement starts at a default difficulty (for example Standard or higher), the real figure is slightly higher than shown. These are selected games, so the results describe this group, not every game on Steam.
• Zero achievements: 2,612 paid games with at least 1,000 Steam user reviews and five or more achievements. The figure is 100% minus the share of players with the game’s most common achievement. It is a proxy: it cannot tell whether someone played, because players can spend time in a game without unlocking its easiest achievement.
• What the numbers mean: Steam reports each achievement as a share of a game’s players. Games that added achievements years after launch look worse than they are, so we left those out of the named examples.
• Genres: taken from each game’s top Steam tags. Tags overlap, so a game can appear in more than one genre, and the number of games is shown next to each group.
• Medians, not averages: a few extreme games would pull an average around, so every group figure is a median. Correlations show association, not cause.

Download the data

Both data sets are free to use with a link to this page: finish rates for 100 story games (CSV) and zero-achievement rates for 2,612 games (CSV). Live player numbers for every game are on our Steam charts and player count page.

Mogrut

Mogrut also known as Ivan across the internet, has been gaming for as long as he can remember, picking up his first controller at the age of five and never really putting it down. A lifelong devotee of the Legend of Zelda franchise, he brings encyclopedic knowledge of Hyrule's every corner, secret, and shrine to every guide he writes. When he's not charting the wilds of Hyrule, you'll find him deep in Azeroth, he has been there since 2004! Gaming isn't just a hobby for Mogrut; it's a way of life, a language, and the lens through which he sees the world. Covers: The Legend of Zelda, World of Warcraft, Adventure Games