Today is a happy day for PC gamers. At the Casual Connect USA conference this week, Valve revealed that Steam, its desktop distribution platform for games, registered a mark of 67 million unique and active players per month.
It’s really a staggering number that surpasses even the number of Xbox Live users in the same period, about 53 million according to Microsoft.
Exploring this number further, Valve also revealed that the number of daily active users is 33 million, with a peak of 14 million concurrent players (the record peak in 2015 was only 8.4 million). Since January 2016, Steam has registered 27 million new buyers, resulting in 1.5 million transactions per month.
Revenue from Success
According to the figures presented by Valve, much of its success is related to the diversity of games, markets and compatible systems.
According to GeekWire, Asian players represented only a small slice of Steam’s worldwide sales until a few years ago. Today, the percentage of sales in Asia is 17 percent of the total. According to Tom Giardino, one of Valve’s directors, this increase is a direct result of efforts to locate the stores in each country and to provide alternative means of payment.
The diversity of content is also one of the factors that contributed to the high growth of the platform. Giardino cited the robustness of the Steam catalog as one of its strongest points. In addition to games, even a series has been made available in the store.
Next week Valve holds its annual Dota 2 tournament in Seattle, United States.
The general user base of Windows 10 has had a subtle growth in the last month, although the pace has slowed thanks to the end of gratuity. But when it comes to games, things change a bit.
According to the most recent data from Steam’s surveys of its clients’ hardware and software, a small number of players moved away from Windows 10 and returned to Windows 7.
This change resulted in the growth of the older version by 0.85% among users of the Steam platform. More surprising is that there was also a 0.01% increase for Windows XP.
As for Windows 10, the 64-bit version of the operating system had a decline of 0.74%, which brings its share of the global market to 33.81%.
