Steam broke records in 2020 and exceeded over 120 million monthly users, Valve revealed today.
While the platform was already seeing “significant growth” before the COVID-19 lockdowns in March, video game playtime “surged” when people started staying at home, “dramatically” increasing the numbers of games played and purchased that year, according to Valve’s 2020 Year in Review.
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has led to new highs for Steam with 120.4 million monthly active users, 62.6 million daily active users, and 24.8 million peak concurrent users. First-time purchasers reached 2.6 million per month and the platform saw 31.3 billion hours of playtime. The number of games purchased also increased by 21.4 percent over the previous year.
To put those numbers into perspective, Steam recorded just 90 million monthly active users in 2018 and 47 million daily active users.
The new record is higher than Xbox Live and PlayStation Network’s equivalent figures, too. In 2020, Xbox had over 100 million users per month, while Sony reached 103 million monthly active users.
Moving into 2021, Valve plans to launch Steam China, improve user experience, refresh the Steam Mobile app and make it easier to log in, and introduce more ways to reward users with the Steam Points program.
