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Steam saw 2.6 million first-time buyers each month last yearAnd had a whopping 120.4 million monthly active users
And had a whopping 120.4 million monthly active users
Valve have published their 2020 Year In Review for Steam, and I’m a little shocked at how dramatic some of their statistics are. Seeing as we experienced a global pandemic during which everyone locked themselves away in their homes, it may not come as a huge surprise that more people took up gaming to pass the time. Valve say2.6 million peoplebought games for the first time on Steam each month, and Steam had 120.4 million monthly active users to boot (though they don’t mention if these numbers are averages, or the actual numbers from each month). I expected a lot, but wow.
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube
Some stats I’m weirdly interested in are the controller ones. In 2020, there were 1.68 billion game sessions where a controller was used, up 66.6% from the 1.01 billion sessions in 2019. Good! Controllers are great for sitting back and chilling out while you’re gaming, it doesn’t have to be all keyboard and mouse all the time.Steam improved support for the fancy new PS5 and Xbox Series X controllersrecently too.
Back in March last year,Steam made changes to its updates and downloads to help free up bandwidthwith everyone suddenly stuck at home. It turns out that this was in response to “various countries' government bodies” approaching them to see how they “could help mitigate the rise in global traffic that ISPs were seeing,” Valve says.
They end it all with a little bit of talk about their plans for 2021, which include launching Steam China early this year, as well as improving game performance and compatibility on Linux. It sounds like more Steam Labs experiments are on the way too, along with updates to existing ones likethe one that’s introducing new ways to browse games.
