Steam had 83,000 new customers every day in 2022

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.