Anyone can easily predict that the gaming industry will boom with a global pandemic. By the way, how much longer did you actually play games? Valve, the parent company of online gaming service Steam, has released some interesting data. According to this, the total gameplay time of Steam subscribers in 2020 alone was 31.3 billion hours, an increase of 50.7% from 2019. The number of new game users also increased by 21.4% to 2.6 million.
Steam is the world’s largest PC gaming online service, and you need to log in to play the game. So, if you want to know how much time people have played games with keyboards or game controllers, Steam’s data is the most accurate.
According to Valve, this growth has already started at the start of 2020. However, it seems that many people enjoyed the game during the lockdown period. The company said in a blog, “Steam has already seen significant growth before the Corona 19 lockdown in 2020, but as people started to stay at home, the time to play video games has skyrocketed, and the number of users who purchase and play games has increased a lot. I hope it was comforting.”
Overall, in 2018, there were 90 million users who logged into Steam at least once a month. In 2020, it increased by 33% to 120 million. In the case of the largest concurrent users, Valve did not release the figures for 2019, but in 2018 it was around 18.5 million. In 2020, it was 24.8 million, an increase of 34%. The number of daily logged-in users also increased from 47 million in 2018 to 62.6 million in 2020.
Meanwhile, what effect did the pandemic have on VR? Steam’s data differed significantly from the diagnosis of many media and analysts that’VR is dead’. According to Valve, there were 114 million Steam VR sessions in 2020. Of these, 1.7 million was the first connection. Sales of VR game titles increased by 32% from 2019. On the other hand, the session duration was not very long. It was an average of 32 minutes.
Looking at the Steam data,’keyboard vs. You can also find answers to old PC gamers’ questions about’controllers’. According to Steam, 46.6 million people played the game using the controller. This is a 47% increase from 2019. In addition, the number of game sessions using controllers increased by 67% compared to 2019 with 1.58 billion.
Of course, the data downloaded through Steam also increased significantly. In fact, according to Valve, it provided a total of 25.2 exabytes of game data in 2020, a significant increase from 16 exabytes in 2019. This is an unrealistic scale, with a capacity of 25.2 million 1TB hard disk drives.
According to Valve, downloads increased by about 30-40% only in March, when the pandemic lockdown began. However, this is weak compared to the release of the topical’Cyberpunk 2077′. The game recorded downloads of up to 52 Tbps, which is twice the previous maximum. The previous maximum was 26Tbps for the pre-download period of this game. [email protected]