330 million hours played on Steam Deck in 2024 up 64% from 2023 - Steam Year In Review 2024

Valve have released their Steam Year In Review 2024 and it's full of interesting data, as well as going over all the changes Valve made to Steam during 2024. Nice to see the Steam Deck and Linux doing so well overall for Valve.

A large part of the post is a refresher on features Valve shipped like Steam Families, Game Recording, cleaning up store page publisher spam, launching Advanced Access, major improvements to the Steam Workshop, requiring developers to list if their game uses Kernel-Level Anti-Cheat, improvements for running Native Linux games, requiring developers to disclose their use of AI and lots more. We're also currently waiting on Valve shipping that public SteamOS Beta that should be sometime soon.

Once you get through the details of what Valve did, then we get to some of the juicy statistics.

There's some interesting bits in there like how the "Steam Deck generated an incredible 330 million hours of Steam playtime in 2024 alone—a 64% increase over 2023". That's pretty impressive on the number of hours but even more so when it increased by such a huge amount. Valve said the future of their hardware is bright too:

The future of hardware at Valve is bright. Steam Deck, SteamOS and SteamVR are delivering tons of value to players and devs, built on top of a decade of investments into UI, linux compatibility, input support, custom silicon, motion tracking, displays, battery efficiency, and more. Every developer making PC games benefits from these investments, and players can now enjoy their PC games in so many new contexts. Hardware teams at Valve are delighted to see Steam in the living room, the airport, the backyard, and wherever else customers want to bring their library of PC games.

As for the growth of Steam, Valve gave us some numbers on that too and it's quite impressive, although they're not giving us new monthly active users (sadly).

Valve said that 1.7 million new users who came from a "top 2023 release went on to enjoy more than 141 million hours of playtime in additional games" along with them spending "$20 million on in-game transactions across hundreds of other games—plus another $73 million on premium games and DLC across thousands more products".

2024 was a big year for new releases too, Valve said it was the "platform's best year ever in terms of customers buying newly released games". Giving a little more detail about how new releases did in 2024; including revenue from the first 30 days following a game release, including pre-purchase revenue and using any Early Access dates instead of a 1.0 release in 2024, Valve listed some major takeaways:

• New Release revenue per year has increased almost exactly 10x since 2014.
• In 2024, more than 500 new titles exceeded $250,000 in New Release revenue (up 27% from 2023).
• In 2024, more than 200 new titles exceeded $1 million in New Release revenue (up 15% from 2023).

One success story that was highlighted is TCG Card Shop Simulator, Valve said it was one of the most successful launches of 2024. Developed by OPNeon Games from Malaysia, Valve noted how the developer is from a "territory that makes up only 0.5% of global traffic on Steam" and their game managed to get "well over a million customers in its first month". Going back to the note above about new customers sticking around from a 2023 release, Valve said about "10,000 of them went on to buy TCG Card Shop Sim".

In closing Valve said:

2024 is in the history books, but our work to improve Steam and Steamworks continues. All year long we'll be attending conferences, hosting roundtables, reading forum comments, and working hard on Steam so that the Year In Review 2025 is packed with more improvements.

Source: Valve