Methodology

The panel

All numbers come from a panel of roughly 680,000 Steam accounts with public profiles, collected via the official Steam Web API. The panel is not a random sample of Steam: it skews toward accounts that keep their profiles public. Treat percentages as panel shares, not Steam totals.

Profiles are rescanned on a rolling basis (~1,500/day), so a full pass takes about a year. Historical wishlist data (each item's date added) is reliable; the most recent one to two months of wishlist activity are undercounted and are flagged or excluded wherever they appear.

Personas

Each user is assigned to exactly one persona by k-means clustering (preceded by PCA) over behavioral features: genre playtime shares, total playtime, library size, backlog ratio, recent-activity share, wishlist size and ratio, median game price, and median release year of owned games. Persona names are editorial labels for the resulting clusters. Persona definitions stay frozen between data refreshes so numbers remain comparable.

Privacy

Only aggregate statistics are published. A game gets a page only with at least 100 owners or 50 wishlisters in the panel; no user-level data leaves the analysis environment, and nothing on this site can be traced to an individual account.