Steam hits new peak player record — more than population of Australia or Netherlands
Steam hit over 30 million concurrent users on Sunday, 23 October 2022, a new record for peak traffic on Valve’s popular PC gaming distribution service.
Third-party Steam statistics tracking website SteamDB.info shows that 30,032,005 users were logged into the service at 14:00 UTC (16:00 South African time) on the day.
Steam’s growth has accelerated in the past two years, despite increased competition from rival storefronts like Epic Games and the Xbox app from Microsoft, which is used to access its popular Game Pass service.
According to a recent report from EnterpriseAppsToday, Steam accounts for around 75% of the global PC gaming market, with daily users of approximately 20 million.
Kotaku previously reported that Steam’s peak usage reached 20 million concurrent users in March 2020, five years after reaching 10 million users. That works out to an average of 2 million additional concurrent users per year.
With the latest jump from 20 million to 30 million, the average was around 5 million per year.
Notably, 30 million users is more than the residents of several well-known countries, including Australia, Netherlands, North Korea, Taiwan, and Venezuela.
The iTunes of gaming
Steam was initially only a software client that Valve used to serve automatic updates for its own games when it launched in September 2003.
In late 2005, the company started offering third-party titles in its storefront on Windows. In subsequent years, it would add support for apps on Mac and Linux.
Steam’s launch represented a significant shift in the gaming market, helping to encourage players to adopt digital game purchases rather than buying physical copies from retailers.
It has done much the same for PC gaming as Apple’s iTunes did for music in the past decade.
Streaming services like Spotify ultimately supplanted iTunes’ business model, and similar subscription-based models have emerged in the gaming world.
The closest contender for the “Netflix of gaming” is Microsoft’s Game Pass, which offers a substantial library of games for a fixed monthly fee.
Valve has partnered with EA to offer a version of the EA Play subscription service through Steam. Valve president Gabe Newell has also confirmed that they would gladly work with Microsoft to bring Game Pass to Steam.
Much of the success in digital game distribution is due to increased global broadband penetration, making it faster and cheaper for gamers to download titles rather than frequent a retailer that sells physical copies.
Steam also runs legendary sales, during which many games are marked down by up to 90%.
The platform has exposed millions of players to indie titles developed by smaller studios, which would have struggled to gain traction had there been no digital distribution platforms.
Loading ...