Valve details 2020 Steam stats and plans for 2021

This includes a platform launch in China and improvements to the browser.
Image via Valve

Steam had an incredible year across its platform in 2020, breaking records and seeing major increases in most areas as users spent more time playing games during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

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As Valve looks back on the year with today’s “2020 Year in Review” blog post, the company is also giving users a brief look at what it’s working on in 2021. 

Prior to lock downs around the world, Valve was already seeing growth on Steam. After March, however, the platform exploded in usage and set new highs with 120.4 million monthly active users, 62.6 million daily active users, and 24.8 million peak concurrent users. 

Image via Valve

There were also 2.6 million first-time purchasers per month, with the number of games purchased increasing 21.4 percent over what was recorded in 2019. Throughout 2020, Steam users recorded more than 31.3 billion hours of playtime, which was a 50.7-percent increase from 2019’s total too. 

Within the three Steam Game Festivals that were hosted on the platform, more than 8.8 million demos were downloaded and activated. The increase was also staggering from the Spring event to the Autumn event, as Spring only saw 600,000 demos downloaded, while Autumn’s edition had 5.1 million. 

Image via Valve

Steam also noted that the Steam Points program saw more than 16 million players participate in themed customizations. On top of that, 104 million sessions were played in SteamVR, with 1.7 million players experiencing VR for the first time in 2020. 

Moving forward into 2021, Valve is working with Perfect World to launch an iteration of Steam directly to a Chinese audience. 

The company is re-working certain aspects of the platform that will make it easier to buy, install, and play games, while also updating the mobile app to make sure users can also login easier and still keep their accounts secure. 

Valve is also going to add more ways to use Steam Points, improve compatibility and performance for games on Mac and Linux through Steam Play, and continue working on Steam Labs projects like better ways to improve browsing the platform’s catalog. 

You can read more about the various changes, statistics, and features Valve detailed on the official blog post for its yearly review.


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Cale Michael
Lead Staff Writer for Dota 2, the FGC, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and more who has been writing for Dot Esports since 2018. Graduated with a degree in Journalism from Oklahoma Christian University and also previously covered the NBA. You can usually find him writing, reading, or watching an FGC tournament.