Valve released its 2020 report detailing the past year for its Steam platform, revealing figures such as player numbers, virtual reality game sales, and more.
The company noted that the COVID-19 global pandemic led Steam to have new highs in categories such as active users and increased playtime for 2020, considering lockdowns around the world caused people to have more free time at home.
The new highs include 120.4 million monthly active users with 62.6 million daily active users. The peak for concurrent players reached 24.8 million players in December, though was broken again at the beginning of January 2021 with 25.4 million concurrent players.
More people at home meant more people buying games with 2.6 million first-time purchasers per month and a 21.4% increase of games purchased compared to 2019. People also played games more with 31.3 billion hours of playtime, a 50.7% increase from 2019.
SteamVR also saw growth in 2020 with 1.7 million first-time VR users and a total 104 million SteamVR sessions played with an average time of 32 minutes, a 30% increase in total playtime. VR Game sales increased by 71% with Valve’s own Half-Life: Alyx taking 39% of sales.
Steam players also used controllers more in 2020 with 46.6 million users who had used a controller to play, up from 31.8 million users in 2019, across 1.68 billion game sessions.
Meanwhile, Steam saw a huge increase in game downloads with 25.2 billion exabytes delivered in 2020. Converted to gigabytes, that’s a little over 27 quintillion. The platform saw a record download traffic of 52 Tbps alongside the launch of Cyberpunk 2077, and 26 Tbps of that were for the preload period alone.
The company noted that “various countries’ government bodies” had approached Valve and “other large Internet companies” on how to mitigate traffic due to it affecting people working from home and remote schooling.
Valve also announced its plans for Steam in 2021 with a native client for China, UI improvements, refreshing the Steam Mobile app, Linux support, and more ways to reward users through the Steam Points program.
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