The gaming world has seen immense growth over the past decade and Steam is one of the platforms at the leading edge of this revolution.
Since being launched by the Valve Corporation in 2003, Steam has had an ever-increasing base of players who log in every day to play or stream their favorite games.
The platform is now one of the largest online gaming websites in the world, with a range of exciting features such as Steam Chat, Game Hubs, Steam Workshop, and many others.
Read the rest of this article as we explore some interesting statistics about Steam, including revenue and market share, user demographics, and game statistics to give you a better view of the platform’s 20-year evolution.
But first, let’s delve into a bit of the platform’s history.
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Steam History
Steam is a digital gaming platform created by Valve Corporation and designed to serve as a PC game distributor.
The platform, which was launched on September 12, 2003, started off as a channel for the company to provide updates to its games. It has since grown to become one of the largest and most popular video game distribution services in the world.
Steam comes with a variety of features for developers, game publishers, and end users. The gaming platform’s creators are constantly working to provide new updates and features, such as:
- Steam Chat: This feature offers a more modernized chat experience with in-line videos, pictures, and tweets.
- Steam Broadcast: This feature lets you stream your gameplay live to your entire community at the click of a button.
- Game Hubs: These are collections of game-centric discussions, screenshots, videos, workshop items, news, etc. that allow you to access all your content in one place.
- Steam Workshop: Steam’s workshop lets you create, discover, and download your own mods and cosmetics for supported games.
Steam comes with an easy-to-access library filled with tens of thousands of games. You can discover, play, and share all your favorite games and get involved with them as they evolve.
The platform also has multilingual features, controller support, and a mobile app that helps provide the ultimate gaming experience for all players.
It’s clear to see that Steam has come a long way from the simple games updates website that it was a couple of decades ago. Now let’s take a look at how the platform works.
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How Steam Works?
This popular digital distribution service works in a simple way. First, you’ll need to download the service from the website’s installation page and follow the prompts to install it on your computer.
Once you sign in, you’ll have access to a marketplace that offers games in a wide range of genres, from indie titles to major releases. You can even sign up to get early access to games so you can be the first to see any new releases.
The library function lets you manage all your games in one place using the platform’s primary DRM (digital rights management) system where you’ll get stats about your gameplay, including hours logged, and more.
From your dashboard, you’ll also have access to a community page for each game you play, as well as the Game Hub where you can upload content, join discussions, and easily chat with other gamers worldwide.
And now on to some exciting Steam statistics.
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Steam Stats: Editor’s Pick
- Steam has over 120 million monthly active users.
- Over 62.6 million people play games on the platform every day.
- The number of hours players spend on Steam has grown by more than 50% from 20.8 billion to 31.3 billion.
- Steam is available in 26 languages.
- Steam surpassed all user milestones when it reached 32,186,301 concurrent online users.
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Below, we take a look at some of Steam’s statistics to give you a better idea of the number of sales this gaming platform makes each year, as well as the revenue it has generated to date.
As previously stated, Steam is the most popular online game distribution service in the world, accounting for 75% of the global market and generating millions of gamers every day.
But did you know that in the first half of 2022, Steam generated $3.1 billion, up 3% year-over-year? This is an impressive figure that gives a firm testament to Steam’s consistent improvement and growth.
In the past year, the platform generated an average of 2.6 million purchases per month. The top 1% of Steam games each earned over $25 million each, while less than 50% made over $5,000 in sales.
The truly surprising fact is that only 100 games accounted for 50% of Steam’s revenue. This means that 0.5% of the games on the platform brought in half of its total sales.
Experts estimate that Steam sales will reach $9.334.35 billion by 2027. This is an encouraging projection, particularly for game developers looking to get started selling their games on the platform.
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Image Source: Statista.com
Of course, since not all games are made equal, a great way to estimate how big a slice of the pie each game takes home is to estimate the number of sales against each game’s reviews.
On average, there are 63 sales for each review on a Steam game, which means a game with 1,000 reviews will likely sell up to 60,000 copies.
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Steam Stats: User Statistics
Steam’s user statistics say a lot about the popularity of the platform, including which demographics are using it most, how many hours are logged playing games, and other relevant data points that are interesting to know.
Here’s a look at some of the key statistics of this platform’s user base.
The US accounts for just 16.8% of all traffic on Steam, with 19% of it coming from China. 43% of adult Steam players in the US are in the 20-29 years age group.
A relatively small percentage of Steam’s traffic is from the US, but the platform continues to generate new users from all around the world. Steam gained its largest number of users in March 2020, during the pandemic, when the platform gained 4.5 million new users.
The number of monthly active players on Steam in 2023 is 120 million, of which there are 62.6 million daily active players. Over 30 million of these users are players in China.
It’s staggering to think that there are so many people logging in to play online games every day, but there it is.
On average, there are 24.8 million people playing games on Steam at any given time of day.
Furthermore, recent statistics show that between the period of 2017 and 2022, Steam’s daily active user count has increased year-on-year – which means that we can expect this trend to continue to grow in the coming years.
Image Source: Statista.com
An even more impressive figure is the peak number of concurrent players ever reached on Steam, which is 32,186,301 players.
In my research, I didn’t come across any other gaming platform that has surpassed this number, and this record is yet to be broken by Steam itself.
Here are some additional Steam user statistics that you might find worthwhile:
- The top five most commonly used languages on Steam are English (38.80%), Simplified Chinese (19.80%), Russian (11.30%), Spanish (5.25%), and German (3.87%).
- The longest continuous game player on Steam has been participating for over 18 years.
- The top player on Steam has reached level 5,000 (St4ck), and the second-place player is at level 3,914.
- The average VR session for Steam users is 32 minutes.
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Steam Game Statistics
Steam currently has over 90,692 games in its database – a number that continues to increase each day. Note that this number does not cover all games ever released on Steam, including those that have been delisted for various reasons.
From 2019 until today, Steam has released 32,202 Indie games which have made at least $6.4 billion. Of these tens of thousands of games on Steam, there are only 12 with a Platinum rating, including Grand Theft Auto V, Dota 2, and Among Us.
The average price for all Steam games is $7.45, and the largest game on Steam is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. It has a file size of over 200GB.
Another interesting game statistic is that the highest-rated game on Steam is Portal 2 which has an average rating of 97.61%. It’s closely followed by Factorio (97.44%), Hades (97.43%), The Witcher: Wild Hunt (97.10%), and Terraria (97.09%).
Interestingly enough, despite having a relatively low positive rating of 88%, the game with the most current players is Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with 614,820 players and 538 million hours of gameplay logged.
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Image Source: SteamCharts.com
By the end of 2022, the most popular genre on Steam (with the highest median earnings) was adult (sexual) content.
But, it’s important to note that sometimes the historical numbers don’t always match up with actual reality. For example, as of this writing, the game with the most concurrent players on Steam is Stranded: Alien Dawn with 2,896 players.
None of the top-rated games mentioned above are even in the top five for the past 48 hours.
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Image Source: SteamCharts.com
- The Steam game with the highest peak players in 2023 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with 1,519,457 peak players in March 2023.
- In 2021, Steam released over 10,000 new games.
- In 2021, 38 billion hours worth of games were played on the platform.
- Steam user, Sonix, owns the most games on Steam – over 24,601 games in total.
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Steam Developer Statistics
Steam isn’t just for players, but also for developers – both indie and big-scale – who use the gaming platform to reach millions of gamers around the world. Here are some fun developer stats:
With an average score of 8.8, Valve has the highest rating among game developers, closely followed by Supergiant Games, Klei Developers, and The Behemoth.
The top three game developers on Steam (with the most popular games) are Rusty Lake, Neko Works, and Supergiant Games.
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Steam Software and Hardware
Steam operates on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. In addition to games, the platform also offers different apps, software, films, anime, and game soundtracks.
Steam accounts for between 50% and 70% of all PC game downloads globally. 71.34% of Steam gamers use Intel processors for their online gaming, and 48 million players use controllers as opposed to keyboard and mouse when playing games on Steam.
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Platforms Similar to Steam
While Steam is one of the most popular gaming platforms out there, it’s far from the only option available to players.
Among the many alternatives to Steam are GOG.com, Humble Store, and Itch.io.
These gaming platforms are great options to consider for anyone looking for an alternative to Steam. They offer many of the same services you’ll find on Steam and come with a few unique features, as well.
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GOG.com
GOG is a large distribution platform for various types of media, including video games and films.
Compared to Steam, GOG games are a lot easier to back up and reinstall on various devices without having to deal with tedious online account authorization processes thanks to the platform’s DRM-free model.
This means that if you purchase a game on GOG, it’s yours to keep, forever.
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Humble Bundle Store
Humble Store is a great place to get some cheap mobile games. The platform works on a pay-what-you-want system which means you can get tons of games for a lot less than you’d normally pay on other platforms.
Although you won’t get the same broad variety of games you’ll find on Steam, it’s still a great alternative for gamers who want to boost their collections without breaking the bank.
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Itch.io
Itch.io has a wealth of free games and while it’s a lot smaller than Steam, it’s actually a superb platform for both gamers and developers since you don’t have to pay anything to post.
There are also a few advanced customization options that you won’t find on Steam. For example, you can add header images to your gaming pages to better represent your brand or personal style as a gamer.
Conclusion
That’s it from me.
I hope this guide has given you an insightful look into this popular gaming platform and what makes it so successful.
