Steam Surpassed Multiple Records in 2020

I think it’s reasonable to imagine that if millions of people the world over are instructed to remain indoors as much as possible by their governments due to a global pandemic, many of those people will turn to tackling their backlogs of video games to pass the time and stay sane. According to its 2020 “Year in Review” blog post, it seems Valve has confirmed this idea to a certain extent based on data gathered from the activity of Steam’s user base over the past twelve months.

You might recall that I reported upon similar data points around this time last year when Valve published its 2019 Year in Review post. In my personal opinion, the most notable Steam-related statistic from 2019 was the fact that nearly 21 billion hours of that year were spent gaming on Valve’s venerable platform. Well, thanks in large part to the dastardly COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying stay-at-home orders, that record was fairly drastically surpassed in 2020.

To be exact, according to Valve’s recently-published data, Steam saw a 50.7% increase in the number of hours played compared to 2019. That rather dramatic uptick brings this particular statistic up to 31.3 billion hours of time spent gaming in total for the year. Within the blog post in question, Valve also shared several other data points which they believe helped in the process of “hopefully bringing some joy to counter-balance some of the craziness that was 2020.”

To name a few examples of these other statistics, consider Valve’s report that throughout 2020, there were 2.6 million people who purchased games on Steam for the first time. I suspect this ended up leading to the fact that there was also a 21.4% increase in the total number of games purchased during the year. Valve also went on to mention that various other areas of Steam’s player base increased considerably, such as the rather significant 120.4 million monthly active users and 62.6 million daily active users.

There’s one more noteworthy aspect of Steam’s performance last year that I particularly want to discuss to some degree. I’m referring to the introduction and subsequent performance of the Steam Points Shop, which was introduced alongside 2020’s annual Summer Sale. For those unaware of how this mechanic works, allow me to boil it down to its basics so that I may briefly discuss what I see as its significance.

Essentially, you earn one point redeemable in the Points Shop for every U.S. cent you spend on games on the Steam Store. So, for example, if you bought a game for $9.99 USD, you would earn 999 points from that purchase. You can then use the points you earn from buying games to purchase cosmetic items such as Steam profile badges, profile backgrounds, avatar backgrounds, animated stickers, and so on.

Many of these items originate from the cornucopia of games available on Steam, as you might imagine. However, you can only purchase game-specific items related to titles that you actually own and have played for at least two hours. I suspect this requirement is in place to prevent players who are only interested in obtaining a game’s Points Shop items from buying the game and then refunding it before having played it for long enough to disqualify themselves from being granted an automatic refund.

According to Valve, sixteen million Steam users participated in the usage of the Points Shop from the date it was officially rolled out through the end of 2020. Ninety-eight thousand items are currently available in the Points Shop, to boot. There is one final note about the Points Shop that I find interesting. Valve reports that 99 million items were purchased with Steam Points throughout that same time frame. I know I’ve certainly contributed to that statistic quite a bit, considering how many points I was automatically granted based on the size of my library back when the Points Shop was initially introduced.

To conclude, there’s still quite a bit of intriguing information present in Valve’s blog post that I elected not to discuss in this article for brevity’s sake. If you want to read over all of it for yourselves, you can do so here. In the meantime, I can’t help but wonder what new features Valve might have planned for Steam this year. To that end, if you’ve got any ideas for new aspects of the venerable platform or just anything you’d like to see Valve consider developing, please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below!