Personally, I have a ton of unplayed games because of Humble Bundle. Like I would buy the bundle for 1 game, and the other 9 came with it. For some of them I would redeem the coupon just in case.
My Thursday morning habit is to download the free games from Epic and Prime Gaming. I have hundreds of games I paid nothing for and will probably never play, but every once in a while I’ll read about an older game, find I have it in my library from one of these giveaways and can enjoy it. When I had PS+ or GamePass I did the same thing. I’ve had less success with Steam, but used to do the same thing with HB. I’m sure there are many others doing the same thing which skews the results.
That and sales, especially the old ones with dailies, you'd see a game at 90% off and you'd go "uh that looks fine I can swing $2 for it" but might never actually get around to playing it.
I am in the same position, except I have had a humble bundle subscription from the very beginning.
Of games I have specifically paid money for, I believe I have played 100% of them.
It's probably the wrong interpretation to say a lot of people are making the decision to buy an individual game and then not playing it. Although I know people who do that, even with physical boardgames, they usually have the intention to play but life gets in the way.
That's a completely different scenario to myself where they just accumulate without me noticing. A number of times I have read a retrospective of a game and wondered if I owned a copy already. I usually get around a 50% hit rate on those.
Same. My library is probably >70% unplayed because of that, but in terms of money spent I’d say the number becomes <10%. And in general people are more likely to impulse buy on discount, especially deep discount. So I won’t count on making most of the revenue from unplayed sales (plus the provided stat is average 32.7% unplayed, median 51.7% unplayed, that’s not “most” anyway).