The corona pandemic is shaping social life worldwide: Lockdown and contact restrictions were and are on the program of “Social Distancing” – this also applied to Christmas. And so, instead of sitting at extensive family dinners or friends, many people preferred to sit on their PC in front of Steam.
It was not until the beginning of December that the download platform set a new record of simultaneously active users. This number could not be exceeded on Christmas Day, but it had significantly more users than in previous years.
In order for Valve to continue to benefit from increasing user numbers in the future, the company has to constantly tweak its most important PC shop. We analyze where Steam is headed in the future:
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This is how Steam will change in 2021
Millions of users at Christmas
Significant increase: According to the data of the Website SteamDB were at peak time on December 25th almost 23 million users logged into Steam at the same time. Compared to the Christmas days of recent years, that’s a steep increase, as the analyst Daniel Ahmad notes on Twitter. In 2019, for example, only around 15.8 million players were logged in at Christmas:
Link to Twitter content
On December 26th, Boxing Day, the numbers even increased again. In the meantime, over 24.6 million users were active at the same time on Saturday.
Not all play: However, the number of users logged in at the same time does not mean that they have played something on Steam at the same time. As a rule, the number of users who are actively involved in a game is considerably lower. Many have the Steam client open in the background or log into the client automatically when they start their PC.
Record year for Steam
The high number of users is not uncommon for Steam this year. Valve’s platform has already set new records several times in the last few months. The corona pandemic had a noticeable impact:
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Corona effects on Steam – many games on the rise
The games also benefit from this. At Christmas the classic multiplayer long-running hits such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, PUBG or Dota 2 were represented above. On the part of the single player faction, Cyberpunk 2077 should be mentioned in particular. The role-playing game, which attracted over a million players simultaneously on Steam at the time of release, is still in the top 5.
You can see which games were rated best in this video:
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Steam Hits 2020 – These games were rated the best
Ongoing Steam Sale: Not to be forgotten, of course, is the annual discount campaign, which also contributes to the active user numbers. The Steam Winter Sale is currently running until January 3, 2021, with countless games on offer.
