Valve just put out their third ever "Year in Review" for Steam, the Community, Labs, and the Steam Store. First up are some interesting facts about player counts for the year that was 2020, a year like none other before it.
Valve divulged that in 2020, they had 120 million monthly active players. This is in combination with the 62.6 million daily active players. That means that in any given day, roughly half of the monthly active users are online playing games on Steam. To that same end, Steam had a peak concurrent player count of 24.8 million people.
In comparison to 2019, Steam users purchased 21.4% more games. Players also played far more in 2020 compared to 2019 to the tune of 50.7% more hours played year over year. These figures are undoubtedly helped by the fact that so many of us were quarantined at home throughout most of 2020.
Valve also goes on to talk about how their Steam Game Festivals had more and more demo activations when compared to the earlier events. For instance, the Spring Steam Game Festival had just 0.6 million demo activations while the final one in the Fall had a staggering 5.1 million demo activations.
Further details from Valve talk about the Steam Points program, Subscription services through Steam, and more. We also learn a bit more about how people play their games, specifically through VR usage.
SteamVR continued to grow in 2020 with game sales up 32% compared to 2019. Valve notes that this figure does not include sales figures for Half-Life: Alyx, which adds an additional 39% on top of that previous amount. In 2020, more than 1.7 million people tried out SteamVR for the first time ever. There were 104 million SteamVR sessions recorded throughout 2020 with a cumulative 30% increase in total VR playtime.
The stats continue on to talk about controller usage on Steam, Linux usage, and a bunch of Steamworks stuff. Valve also talks a bit about some of the behind-the-scenes information that you wouldn't normally see. For instance, Steam delivered a massive 25.2 exabytes of data in 2020. The studio says that at the start of March, there was a 30-40% increase in total download traffic related to game downloads. Combined with the biggest launch of the year, Cyberpunk 2077, download traffic hit 52 Tbps, which doubled their previous peak.
These details and more can be found at Valve's 2020 Year in Review for Steam.
