Valve is doing its part to illustrate the growth of games in 2016 by reporting their numbers in the Steam Year in Review report. This report also shows some impressive statistics like the fact that PC gamers increased their playtime by over 50%, that each month, 2,600,000 people bought a game on Steam for the first time, and that (total) over 500,000 people installed Steam for the first time.
If one allows for ugly times, then the year of 2020 was a rather rough one for quite several of us. However, we all found ways to minored in gaming, and, on that note, it is easy to make the argument that it was an exceptional year for video games. Over half of Americans played video games in 2020, and while Steam's numbers only represent the PC (and doesn't count games like Fortnite that appear on rival PC stores), it still speaks to the fact that PC gaming is not just surviving, but thriving.
The data provided by the survey information showed us all that 2020 was a year for gaming. Slip up here.
Besides the extra time spent playing and the newcomers to the platform, Steam's data also shows that the number of games sold grew by 21.4 percent, and the platform had 24.8 million people playing at once, setting a record for concurrent players for the second time that year.
2020 was also the year that Valve's own Half-Life saw release: Alyx. Now, Valve has dropped a new VR game on us that claims to be the killer app for the new VR systems, and we'll see if it's any good. How do Steam's stats stand the test? It doesn't. Although virtual reality (VR) certainly grew, with 1.7 million people using Steam's interface for the first time, they confirm it I can attribute this to new headsets being released and receiving rave reviews. Valve also reports that there was a 71 percent increase in sales of the VR headsets, with the number one selling device, the Alyx, making up 39 percent of the sales. VR systems are used to host more playtime with the users playing for more hours.
Steam's VR stats are looking pretty good. Picture of the valve.
Valve today noted that Steam controlled usage has increased by 66.6% over the past three months to 683 million sessions, with the vast majority of them taking place outside the traditional desktop computer model of mouse and keyboard to play games. Steam has mentioned its work on bringing games to Linux with its Proton runtime and calls out the Death Stranding and Cyberpunk 2077 game as a game available on the OS as soon as it became available on Windows. PC is in the wild west right now.
