Valve has put out their Steam Year In Review for 2022 and while they didn't give us a new monthly active user count, there were plenty of other details shared.
One that's the most striking to me, was the note about how they saw a completely ridiculous 83,000 "new first-time purchasers every day of the year". That is just absolutely nuts. Steam is clearly stronger than ever and growing at a crazy pace. Valve noted how they crossed over 30 million users online last year too, which was only a year and a half after hitting 20 million for the first time.
What's driving the growth then? The PC (that's Personal Computer — PC doesn't mean Windows) is an open platform and isn't "reliant on any one product or manufacturer" said Valve. Certainly is a benefit as they said anyone can come along with "a beat-up old laptop or a brand new top of the line rig, and plug in any peripheral they want" and with the Steam Deck too of course there's more ways than ever to play.
A lot of the post is just going over things I've reported on across last year like Steam Deck, Proton updates, Big Picture Mode, Dynamic Cloud Sync and their regular Steam Input updates. There was also their update to Game Hubs, the new Steam Mobile App and all their new festivals and sales.
When it comes to what's driving people to Steam it was a big mix of established names and new developers too. Of course they have stuff like Call of Duty, Elden Ring and others but they also mentioned how 85 of the top releases during 2022 were from studios releasing their first game — with developers spread across the globe too.
Going along with their growth in customers, they had a lot of downloads too. They said the content delivery increased by "36%" as they served up 44.7 exabytes. To put it into perspective they said that would be the equivalent to having "every one of the 8 billion people on planet Earth downloaded a 5.5 gigabyte game".
Simply incredibly growth. Valve pretty much continue to be a money printing machine. It's hard to imagine but with the 30% cut they take from most developers, that's a whole lot in the bank.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
gradyvuckovic Feb 17, 2023
For instance, during the 2022 Autumn Sale, 1.4 million accounts made their first-ever purchase on Steam. That’s about 134 new customers every single minute, for seven days straight.
InhaleOblivion Feb 17, 2023
When it comes to what's driving people to Steam(…)
it's Dolphin randomly crashing with multiple tabs open. Sorry – had to be done.
Epic, Ubisoft and their ilk don't get it. They want a piece of that pie themselves, but they have to force people onto their platforms.
StalePopcorn Feb 17, 2023
legluondunet Feb 17, 2023
They deserve all the success they have. What's really great is after all this time they have wisely not become a publicly traded company. Who would then be fully beholden and have a fiduciary responsibility of growth and ultimately profit to their shareholders.
Yup. Because they are private (and because good people work there), they can do whatever they want.
If they would have been a public traded company the Steam we now know would be completely different (for the worse) and Linux and Steam Deck would not be a thing.
This is because Valve is a Teal organization, rather than a typical Orange-tier organization (basically corporate communism with layers of bureaucracy) like all of its competitors. To understand how these management paradigms work, I recommend reading Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux. The Valve new employee handbook is also a great resource to understand how Valve implements the Teal management paradigm: https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployeeHandbook.pdf
Valves employee handbook sure is fun to read.
I stumbled also on this article that Frederic Laloux wrote back in 2015: https://www.strategy-business.com/article/00344
Article is bit lengthy, but it goes through all the organizational modes and dives bit deeper in one teal organization.
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