Steam: 2020 in Review

In Mid-January 2021, Valve offered users a small insight into the kind of year that Steam had with its user base, looking back on the new features introduced and the milestones that were hit in 2020. 2020 was a huge year for Steam, with 120 million monthly active users and a peak concurrent player count of 24.8 million players. This led to a 50% total increase of overall hours spent playing games on Steam across all its users.

2020 also saw success for the Steam Game Festivals, which only grew in popularity as the year went on. The Spring Game Festival saw nearly 600k game demo activations off of just a small handful of games. This only grew by the Summer Festival, which saw 3.1 million demo activations, millions of people on the livestream, and developer spotlights obtaining similar numbers. Autumn Festival saw another surge, with an astounding 5 million demo activations.

The Steam Labs function, which sets about to experiment new features on Steam, continued to be a success in 2020. Play Next was a feature that helped users to discover unplayed games within their game libraries, and was met with such good reception that it became a permanent feature on the Steam library. An expansive update to the store’s search filters also became a permanent feature, as well as Community Recommendations, where users can view a feed of recent reviews.

2020 also saw the launch of Steam Points, a system that rewards users for buying from the store and interacting with the community, allowing them to trade in points for emoticons, animated profile backgrounds, and lots more to customise their profile to their liking. In 2020, 15.5 million users redeemed their points for nearly 100 million different items.

VR also took a huge skyrocket in 2020, with everyone staying at home and having the time to commit to it. The sale of VR games went up by 32% compared to 2019, and that’s not even counting Half-Life: Alyx, which alone increased this value by 39% on-top of that. 2020 saw over 104 million SteamVR sessions, with 1.7 million users trying VR for the first time.

VR wasn’t the only kind of controller that saw prevalence on steam. It was found that 46.6 million players were using a controller to play their Steam games, compared to the 31.8 million from 2019. This year saw the arrival of the next-generation of consoles, and with added support for these controllers also available on Steam, it is truly a storefront that allows any method of play.

As for 2021, Valve has teased some of what the future holds for Steam, including more Steam Labs experiments, a small revamp of the points system, and even plans to bring Steam to China. If you want to get in-depth with all the stats and data that was compiled, alongside all the graphs to go with it, check out the original review found on the Steam store, alongside the previous years’ reviews for comparison.