Valve Shares “2021 Year in Review” Post

It’s that time of year once again when companies like Valve take a look back at their performance in the previous year. Thankfully for data nerds and die-hard Steam users like myself, Valve in particular tends to make those metrics public within an annual blog post. I’ve covered a few of Valve’s so-called “Year in Review” blog posts here on Phenixx Gaming in the past, and now that such a post for 2021’s analytics is publicly viewable, this time around won’t be much different. Let’s get to a select few of the more tantalizing raw numbers, shall we?

Valve kicked off the first set of data points in their “2021 Year in Review” post by stating that “2021 was successful even in comparison to 2020’s unprecedented growth.” As an example of what they mean by that, consider the fact that Steam apparently saw a 21% increase in time spent gaming on the platform compared to last year.

To put that in perspective with some actual numbers, 2020’s metric for total playtime was 31.3 billion hours, while that of 2021 was nearly 38 billion hours. I’m actually unsure as to how much I may have contributed to the newest figure. However, I’m sure I put in my fair share of hours considering all the games I played for work purposes throughout 2021.

On a couple of related notes, Valve went on to mention that the amount of money players spent on purchasing games via the Steam Store increased by 27% compared to 2020. They also announced that 2021 saw roughly the same number of new Steam users who purchased games on the platform for the first time as 2020 did. That figure puts first-time purchasers at about 2.6 million each month of last year, which I find to be particularly astronomical.

Valve also shared a new metric for 2021 concerning digital Steam gift cards. Even though the ability to send digital gift cards to your Steam friends was introduced back in 2017, Valve stated that this feature saw what they call “amazing growth” throughout 2021. That’s what prompted them to include a relevant update within the most recent Year in Review post. To be specific, the numbers Valve included state that the dollar value of Steam gift cards increased by 43% compared to 2020, and that upwards of 2.6 million gift cards were sent over the course of 2021.

The next set of data points Valve shared in this blog post concerns Steam’s wonderful Remote Play Together feature. For those of you who might be unfamiliar with this functionality, what it does, and why I think it’s so fantastic, let me quote Valve directly: “In March of 2021, [Steam’s original Remote Play feature] got even better with new Remote Play Together features, so customers can instantly share a local multiplayer session over Valve’s network[.] One player owns and runs the game, and their friends can quickly join in, even if the game developer never built online multiplayer support.”

The last thing Valve went on to say regarding Remote Play Together is as follows: “Amazingly, this tool even works for friends who don’t have a Steam account – all they need is a smartphone, tablet, or PC. Since launching the new Together features last spring, shared gameplay has made up 34% of all remote play sessions.” I think you see now why I think Valve’s commitment to improving this Remote Play Together feature is particularly commendable.

Moving on from that, Valve also shared a few random tidbits about the performance of last year’s two most notable Steam sales, the Summer Sale and Winter Sale. Valve claims that 2021’s Steam Summer Sale was the biggest event on the platform to date. At least until that record was apparently broken a few months later by last year’s Winter Sale.

Valve notes that revenue for developers increased by 13% during the Summer Sale. For its part, the most recent Winter Sale also saw 2.3 million people buy a game on Steam for the first time, all during the same two-week time frame during which the discount extravaganza was active. I’d personally call that especially impressive.

Of course, the biggest department in terms of news as far as Valve has been concerned over the past while is easily the recent launch of the Steam Deck. Valve didn’t share any specific, raw numbers about the Steam Deck’s performance, which I think is understandable considering the device has only officially been on the market for less than a month at the time of writing.

However, they did go into a fair bit of detail about how they’ve been preparing things like Steamworks and their Proton compatibility layer that the Steam Deck uses to ensure that as many games run on the handheld console as smoothly as possible. I’m not going to go into any of that in this article, but if you’d like to read about Valve’s efforts for yourself or any of the other data points I’ve left out, you can always check out 2021’s Year in Review post. I included a link to it within this article’s introductory paragraph if you’re curious.