A fresh set of data from Ampere Analysis this week gives us some new insight into how players across Xbox, PlayStation and PC interact with their games - and the results are interesting if somewhat predictable.
The headline here is that Xbox users play more games on average than those across Steam and PlayStation. According to Ampere's analytics, "Xbox gamers played an average of 5.7 different titles, whereas Steam gamers played an average of 4.5, and PlayStation gamers played an average of just 3.7" - and that's for August 2025.
The firm goes on to talk about Xbox Game Pass and its role in this data; here's what it said on that:
"With an estimated 34m total subscribers and the majority of those accessing the service via an Xbox console, Game Pass is a strong driver behind the high game consumption of Xbox users. As of August 2025, there are more than 500 unique titles available to console users of Game Pass. Although this is considerably fewer than PlayStation Plus Premium, which offers just under 1,000 games, Game Pass subscribers are far more active across the available titles. On average, PlayStation users play two fewer games each month compared to Xbox users – and this has been the case since Ampere tracking began in August 2022.
While multi-game consumption is higher on Steam than on PlayStation, Steam users still play around one game fewer than Xbox users in an average month. This highlights the cost barrier in terms of accessing and playing games content. The average price of a game on Steam is far lower than on the console platforms, and yet the perceived value of Game Pass is encouraging gamers to play many more titles than they would ordinarily."
Finally, the topic of how many hours are put into these games is discussed. Although Ampere says that "this figure can vary considerably" from month to month, August 2025 shows Xbox users averaged 7.7 hours in-game, compared to 11.9 on Steam and 12.7 on PlayStation. That variation mentioned can depend on what games are hitting the platform in any given month - for instance, Call of Duty can bump things up on Xbox; Black Ops 6's launch month last year led to an average in-game time of 10.4 hours on the platform instead.
This is all pretty interesting stuff, and it reaffirms the notion that Xbox Game Pass leads to players trying out a greater variety of games - even if that means they don't put as many hours in overall. We can't really blame folks for trying to get max value out of the service either, especially as individual game prices go up and up.