Steam hits 10M concurrent in-game players in record-breaking weekend

Agreed! To me and all the gamers I know, Steam (and consoles) is gaming, whereas cell phone games are that scammy market full of skinner boxes, ads, and deliberately broken games designed to milk you for money. I never would have guessed that most of the world disagrees, and cell phone game sales are probably 10x the revenue of Steam game sales.

As much as us nerds would like to think otherwise, PC gaming is, and will always be, a niche market. The average person simply does not even consider it. Computers are for work, and games are something you do on your phone or a console for the overwhelming majority of people. It's why tethered VR will never be a mainstream thing, and why Carmack was so adamant about the Quest.

I sometimes have this reaction, and then I reflect that Steam is still a niche that might have peaked long ago given most of the top 10 played games are really old in gaming terms.

The top 2 currently most played games were first released ten years ago.

If that's the state of gaming then that's a damning indictment of the last 10 years of gaming releases. I'd wager the top 10 are currently as old as they've ever been.

Either games have got worse, gaming as a whole has stagnated, or people are playing things which aren't on steam.

Between the "xbox live" store thing, the epic store, etc, we're seeing a fragmentation of store-fronts which likely also contributes especially since Steam is the only one that's actually open about their stats.

You also have developers like Riot and Blizzard also doing their own thing.

For "live service" games like Diablo, Valorant, or indeed Roblox, a store-front like steam doesn't feel as important because it's not all about initial sales and indeed cut-price discounts aren't how the games are sold, with in-game-purchases dominating.

This leaves Steam to cater for the single-player market, but given the discrepancy in hours played between even the single player games I've enjoyed the most and the online service games, I can understand why the latter have vastly higher concurrents.

Yup - Steam Deck convinced me that Linux is a viable gaming platform.

As a Dota enjoyer, I kind of disagree, but that's just one game. I need to look up how much money it actually makes them.

Yup. My steam account is old enough to vote and it's never even crossed my mind to go elsewhere (exception: Good Old Games for older or self published games). The Epic Store is never going to earn my loyalty due their exclusivity deals.

Lets not forget that Valve was one of the early adopters of loot boxes with Counter Strike and TF2.

> gives them what they want

I did not get Half-Life 3 yet.

But on a serious note, we don't know how successful they actually are. They are a private company. Concurrent players & logged in users growing, with more and more gamers around the world and covid as a catalyst over the last years is probably not a good sole indicator. Those are growing for everybody, just compare them to Roblox alone.

I'd say maybe a better one could be pretty much every publisher returning or rumoured to return soon - but that could also just mean better deals for them and Valve also not making more money.

Besides that, doesn't seem all sunshine at Valve either. There were reports of a hostile work environment in the past, among other things supposedly due to the ego-fuelling bonus structure.

When Alyx arrived GabeN talked about how they'll ship two more big VR titles soon-ish, which didn't happen and which supposedly are at least on hold. We at least know that they currently work on a non-vr game called Neon Prime right now and that might or might not ship soon.

The Dota 2 and especially the CSGO community wishes for more communication and updates for their games. The Source 2 update for CSGO has more people coping now than HL3.

They let games like Artifact and Underlords just die. Especially Artifact, with being a buy-to-play title where you additionally had to buy the cards for additional real money, had quite some controversies around the game and how Valve handled everything.

At least in CSGO the esports scene is also not happy either with how Valve ignores and handles cheat & fraud cases half-assed. Their own anti-cheat in CSGO is also still shit.

It probably helps a lot that it's still not a publicly traded company. Steam can prioritize long-term profits and doesn't have to squeeze out its user base for every last penny. Counter example: Activision/Blizzard.

I lost respect for Valve after they discovered cash cows that are Dota and CS:GO skins, hired economists to hyper-optimize milking their customer base and subsequently abandoned making good single-player games like they used to. Their greed culminated in an "Artifact" which flopped hard in large part due to its monetization model.

Warning to all HN commenters who are reading this and want to find out what "Vampire Survivors" is - clear your schedule before you try it. Crazy good game that makes you forget about time longer than 30 minute increments.

One of them for sure. (Me)

Apparently it's the highest number in Steam history, meaning active user numbers have been growing, not shrinking. That at least should put the decades old meme to rest that "PC gaming is dead" ;)

What useful insights these stats can provide depends on what question you’re trying to answer with what other data you can publicly get, combine, and estimate from. Internally Steam keeps very detailed playtime-by-game-by-user stats but as for what’s aggregated and published publicly you just get the stats the article talks about which leads to it being the best way to monitor growth/activity. It’s been a while since Valve publicly reported MAU but I think it was something like 130 million in 2021.

Steam APIs used to report achievement statistics float-accurate. This was patched once people started using it to estimate game sales based on “launch the game” type achievements. Not sure how many data holes like this have existed. The flip to your game stats being private by default also limited scraping abilities.

They also give samples hardware stats of their user base publicly by month but that doesn’t really tell you much about the platform. Cool for other things though (mainly intended for developers to understand what the user base has).

I agree that it's a meaningless number by itself. The interesting part for me was seeing that the number of connected users went up by 50% over pandemic, from 20M to 30M. Given that Steam was pretty mature at that point, that's a big jump. Presumably it was due to quarantine. But it's also interesting that nobody is really in quarantine right now, so breaking that record means they've just grown quite a bit despite already being very large. The games they're playing are (mostly) not new either, so this just reflects a massive growth in the platform qua platform over the last couple years.

It looks surprisingly low initially but I don't think it actually is. 10 million people, that is 1 in 800 of the world population. You sleep eight hours, that makes it 1 in 533 of all people awake. Then we have to divide out the part of the world population lacking the means to use Steam, Internet usage alone seems to be about 5 out of 8 according to the numbers a quick search turned up. This brings us down to 1 in 333 at most, their might however be a correlation between Internet users and being awake. Then we have console gaming vs PC gaming even though streaming and handhelds might make this a bit fuzzy. An older number I found says 1 in 3 are playing on a PC, dropping us to 1 in 111. And people of course do many other things besides playing games including not playing games at all, but it gets progressively harder for me to come up with realistic numbers and more and more correlations will make just multiplying fractions more and more wrong, so I will leave it a that.

gog does what you describe: refurbish good old games and make them playable on your modern computer