Steam gamers played 50 percent more and bought 21 percent more in 2020

Figures from Valve on the use of Steam show that gaming has experienced significant growth in 2020. The total number of hours played by all users together was 50.7 percent higher than a year earlier and 21.4 percent more games were sold.

Steam had peaks of 120.4 million monthly active users and 62.6 million daily active players in the past year, Valve reports. Last year, the number of monthly active users was still 95 million. In 2020, not only have many gamers been added, but existing users have also spent more time on games. Valve states that Steam already saw growth at the beginning of 2020, before the corona pandemic broke out, but when that happened and people increasingly stayed at home due to lock-down measures, the numbers rose dramatically.

Steam also reached a new peak in the number of concurrent players, of 24.8 million. Every month there were 2.6 million users who made a purchase on the games platform for the first time. The total playing time of all users in all of 2020 is 31.3 billion hours, which is 50.7 percent higher than the total playing time a year earlier. The number of games purchased was 21.4 percent higher than the previous year. As a result of the growth, Steam’s data traffic rose sharply, to 25.2 Exabytes for the whole year. With the release of Cyberpunk 2077, a peak of 52Tbit/s was measured.

Steam added 1.7 million new VR users in 2020, and VR game revenue grew 71 percent. That’s largely thanks to Half-Life: Alyx, which accounted for 39 percent of the sales growth. There were 104 million SteamVR play sessions throughout the year, lasting an average of 32 minutes. Total playing time was 30 percent longer than last year.

More and more players are using a controller to play Steam games. There are 46.6 million users with a controller, compared to 31.8 million at the end of 2019. In 2020, 1.68 billion game sessions were started with a controller, a growth of 66.6 percent compared to the previous year.

The Steam Game Festivals, in which free demos are playable, are also becoming more popular. In the spring, 0.6 million demos were activated during such an event, 3.1 million in the summer edition and 5.1 million in the autumn festival.