Almost 21 Billion Hours Were Spent Gaming on Steam in 2019

Those of you who find yourselves interested in the more technical side of Steam and how it works might be interested to know that Valve published its “2019 Year in Review” blog post yesterday morning. This blog post contains quite a few statistics and other bits of information about various topics, such as sales and public reception to many new features that were added to Steam over the course of last year. Considering I’m an avid Steam user, just as I’m sure many of our readers are, I personally find the majority of these statistics and related tidbits quite interesting.

To name a couple of examples of data points that particularly piqued my interest, consider Valve’s report that since they officially unveiled the huge overhaul to Steam’s library system and released it in a non-beta state at the end of October, they’ve seen an increase of over 300% in the amount of user reviews posted to Steam on a daily basis. Valve states this increase is largely due to features that were added in the new library system which are designed to more frequently prompt users for their opinions and reviews of games they’ve recently played.

Another intriguing piece of data included in Valve’s blog post states that beginning in November of 2019, over 2.3 million players used Steam’s new “Remote Play Together” feature. That’s a functionality that I personally consider excellent because it eliminates the “local-only” restriction of co-op features in compatible games, and instead allows them to be played entirely online so long as your co-op partner is on your Steam friends list. Because of that, I think it’s little wonder that particular feature was used so much in 2019 despite only being available for the last two months of the year.

A third data point revealed by Valve that caught my eye is that, as you gleaned from this article’s title, 20.7 billion hours of 2019 were spent gaming on the venerable platform. I’d like to think I contributed at least two hundred or so of those hours, so I feel as though I’ve done my part to add to that statistic. Valve credits that rather astronomical number to “all of the ways Steam enables players to enjoy [their] games,” such as SteamVR, Steam Remote Play, which uses the Steam Link mobile app, and the aforementioned Remote Play Together.

Valve concluded this blog post by including some details about certain features they plan to implement in some way throughout the coming months. Of these features, the one that excites me the most is a planned overhaul to the methods by which game soundtracks can be purchased and accessed within Steam. Valve has reportedly received quite a lot of feedback about Steam’s current model in which soundtracks are sold as DLC for games that offer them; I suspect this feedback likely led to Valve’s interest in addressing that concern.

To conclude this article on a more personal note, I’ll have used Steam virtually every day for the past nine years as of this May. I have the vast majority of my PC games on the legendary platform, which is a significant reason why I don’t intend to stop using Steam anytime soon. I, for one, am always excited to see what new tricks and features Valve says it has up its metaphorical sleeve, especially if they’re planning something as momentous as last year’s library update.