While Steam as a gaming platform is facing ever increasing competition, Valve likely aren't too worried given how much Steam has been growing over 2020 and into 2021.
After setting a new concurrent user record of 24,804,148 in December 2020, that was once again smashed on January 2, 2021 with 25,415,080 user accounts online but only 7.4 million were actually in-game (thanks SteamDB). It's not exactly a surprise, with multiple user records for both Steam and games being broken through 2020 with many more staying at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The top dog on Steam remains as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Valve's first-person shooter originally released back in 2012. It obviously helps that it went free to play back in late 2018 which helped keep its popularity and since the pandemic really hit, the numbers for CS:GO have repeatedly hit new highs.
It will definitely be interesting to see how the Steam playerbase evolves through 2021, especially if we see Valve release one of those secret projects they teased before. Hopefully one that's more available to everyone and not a VR-only title like Half-Life: Alyx, since the cost of VR is still rather high. Considering they're a private company though, they can do and work on whatever they want.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Jan 4, 2021
Quoting: ShabbyXIs it just me, or are these numbers surprisingly low? You would think there are many more PC gamers. Anyone knows how these numbers compare to playstation for example?
I'd mention other platforms, Epic Games launcher/store with a lot of free games over the last year alone. And I also have a few friends exclusively playing on Xbox games pass thingy or origin, blizzard (maybe uplay) launchers.
And last but hopefully not least GOG and standalone games such as MMORPG.
On Linux we tend to mostly play on Steam because that's where the hardwork happens to make it run on Linux but there's also Lutris and much more.
Quoting: ShabbyXIs it just me, or are these numbers surprisingly low? You would think there are many more PC gamers. Anyone knows how these numbers compare to playstation for example?There are many more PC gamers--that's just the number that were all online, on Steam, at the same time.
Quoting: aokamiI don't see how relevant that can be given that these numbers are a record for Steam.Quoting: ShabbyXIs it just me, or are these numbers surprisingly low? You would think there are many more PC gamers. Anyone knows how these numbers compare to playstation for example?
I'd mention other platforms, Epic Games launcher/store with a lot of free games over the last year alone.
Steam's numbers have continued to go up--we can speculate that they'd have gone up even more if it weren't for Epic and Stadia and whatever, but I remember just a few years ago the new record being around 15 million, not 25 million. Other stores are clearly not causing Steam to hurt in any significant way.
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