If you ever try building a PC again, I strongly suggest grabbing a bag of zip ties and some packing tape. I liberally use zip ties in my build to keep routed wires running to the same spots together, like one single bound wire, and small strips of packing tape to keep them pressed onto the chassis of the case. It makes for a much cleaner build, even if it takes considerably more time.
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Steam Concurrent Users Passes 8 Million
- Thread starter Nzyme32
- Start date
If you ever try building a PC again, I strongly suggest grabbing a bag of zip ties and some packing tape. I liberally use zip ties in my build to keep routed wires running to the same spots together, like one single bound wire, and small strips of packing tape to keep them pressed onto the chassis of the case. It makes for a much cleaner build, even if it takes considerably more time.
Oh I know those are huge as well, but 5 million concurrent players for a game that is honestly one of the most complex around is just crazier to me.
Yoda
Member
He's making a comment about the graph starting @ 30million. Given there aren't really political overtones to the graph I don't think it's really that big of a deal.
Not that he will if he can afford to pay $100 to not deal with it, but people who don't like working in crowded spaces could look into a larger mid tower or full tower case.
It's testament to the breadth of genres that combine to make the PC gaming landscape. My current favorite thing about PC gaming is that Space Sims (and heck, arcade-space sims too) are suddenly back with a vengeance. Who saw that coming??
I actually find joy in putting my PC together - the same sort of joy someone might find in maintaining a bonzai tree. Not just physically putting it together, but spending a weekend setting up the operating system environment so that it's best suited for my TV.
I can certainly see why someone would much rather just pay the $100 and be done with it. But I honestly enjoy doing it, like a hobby.
My current build is an mITX, an Antec isk 600 actually. Length and width are near identical to that of the Xbox One (although turned, such that the shorter side is the front) although it's about 2.5 times taller. Such a slick, small case. It's got a blue light running down the front that reminds me of the PS4. All my "next-gen" machines (PC, Xbone, PS4) are of similar sizes and shapes.
It means at the same time. Active users means people who have logged in within the past month.
There are 75 million active users on steam, meaning 75 million individuals, at least once, have signed on to steam within the last month. Of that 75 million, 8 million were logged in at the same time (concurrently).
Yoda
Member
And such people existed when the service first started, the point is that there is clear growth in people purchasing PC games as opposed to earlier years when the industry said consoles were the future (now they are telling us mobile). Simply put its somewhat the same as looking at LTD sales of PS4/Xbox One, not everyone will use their platform and some will let it collect dust under their TV. Just as you can "not count" on this list, people who only buy software for a console platform once every blue moon can also not be counted.
IncandescentPrecept
Banned
I think we'd get a more accurate number if they disable to launch at startup by default.
rudieboy77
Member
Yeah every town has a local PC shop that would be more than happy to assemble your parts for like a $100.
RadioactiveLobster
Member
There are a lot of people who use the 360/One as a "Netflix" box, they are still counted as part of the total group of XBL subscribers (though this will change with the recent changes to Gold)
DigitalDevilSummoner
zero cognitive reasoning abilities
Sarcasm aside, the point of the pc paming is dying remark was obviously not that people would stop from playing on PCs altogether, it was that the pc gaming as we knew it was radically changing. In other words, it was not that medium was going extinct, it was the type of gaming primarily developed with the PC as a leading platform was on its way out. So you are in fact correct on both occasions; PC gaming died as the type of gaming that was about stand alone epics and long lives as gaming based on large active online communities.
A long way to say that PC gaming was Half Life, now it's Dota and Valve is a terribly slow developer for my outdated tastes.
Does that mean I am part of the 8M?
I don't shut down my computer or Steam.
I just let it runs on sleep mode 24/7, and once in a blue moon needs to shut down for upgrade/patching.
I only use Steam when I buy stuff, but I don't play those stuff...Fricken ironic as a PC gamer.
And every Blizzard game too. And GOG etc.
I guess, but Steam isn't exactly the whole piece of the PC gaming pie.
PC was never one game or another. PC gaming has always been about many different types of games. You can say it was about Half Life, but someone else could turn right around and say that they were playing Baulders Gate 2 instead at the time. Someone might say PC Gaming is DOTA, and then another person can turn around and say they're playing Star Citizen instead.
That's always been the strength of PC gaming. Marginalized games can thrive in this environment.
Yup.
Green Card
Member
What do you mean setting up the OS so its suited for your TV?
Saucycarpdog
Member
No I'm being serious here. I just put together a bunch of computer doohickey things on newegg just now and added all of the prices together and it added up to.....uh...like $2000 which of course is more than the $399 price of a new console. $399 vs. $2000, I think we know what is cheaper here.
Also, since only MMOs and MOBAs are popular on PC I'm pretty sure that 8 million number is just inflated by all of those people playing LoL and WoW.
a variety of things that take time to set up properly. For example, when my PC boots (I'm running windows 8 on my Steam Box in the living room) it creates an ad-hoc wireless network from the dual wifi on the motherboard, that I use for things like remote display on my phone. I try to make windows as invisible as possible (black background, auto-hide the task bar, etc) and boot into big picture mode immediately.
I control my entire PC using a Gyration MCE remote. I need to spend some time with EventGhost to reprogram a lot of the keys on it for specific applications, like XBMC - i have a button on the remote that automatically queues and item, and so forth.
I write a bunch of scripts and then turn them into executables and put them into Steam as non-steam Apps, then create icons for them. Like, take for example The Longhorn Network (I'm a UT alumnus). I don't actually have u-verse TV, only u-verse internet, but that still lets me log in to the longhorn network streaming website to watch the channel online. I created a firefox profile such that, when I launch into that profile, it goes full screen, sets my homepage to the longhorn network, automatically logs me in, etc. I created a batch file to launch firefox within that profile, then turned that script into an executable, then put the executable into Steam, then gave it an icon, and now when I select that icon from BPM, it launches into The Longhorn Network at the press of a button.
Lots of little things like that, that most people don't consider. I also have to set up my Xbox controller dongle etc etc. All this stuff is things you only have to do once, but they still take time to set up. I usually devote a weekend after building a PC to doing all these hundreds of small things I do to make the experience as smooth and seamless as possible.
EDIT: Once I get my environment configured just the way I like it after a clean install, I also mirror my harddrive so that, if I ever need to return to that point, I can just restore from the mirror. I also frequently mirror my current configuration onto a D-Link DNS-323 server in my house in a Raid-1 configuration with a script that boots me into offline mode. That way, should anything ever happen to steam, I can restore from an offline point and have unlimited access to my games, even if I have to "reinstall."
Setting all this stuff up to be automated takes a while, too.
Mass Effect
Member
God I hope you're joking because if you're not, you have no idea what the fuck you're talking about.
EDIT: Damn it, I think I just got trolled.
AcademicSaucer
Member
Those dota 2 users that dont spend a penny
Jawmuncher
Member
Wonder when it will hit 10 million.
rudieboy77
Member
You have to shop around and wait for the once a year sales. I have a 4770k/7970Ghz set up that would run easily $1500 and I paid $800 for it.
It would be amazing if Valve built some tools like that into Steam and SteamOS as part of the ongoing effort to make them more at home in the living room.
This shows you don't know much about Steam and/or the PC market.
All Blizzard games and league of legends have their own separate launchers and clients and don't even sell or advertise their games on Steam.
They don't need to.
http://www.dota2.com/international/compendium/
I can't hear you over all the money Valve made on the compendium.
They have. My steam machine I got from Valve at Steam Dev Days sits in my bedroom, and it runs SteamOS instead of Windows. It's a lot more plug-and-play than Windows, and they've been slowly adding features to BPM that I don't think many people realize get added. The other day, for example, I noticed I could suddenly force a game to quit by holding the xbox button (or middle key on the steam controller) in a game long enough for BPM to pop up asking me if I'd like to force the application to quit.
Windows (and linux, and OSX) is not really suited for a ten-foot UI. Getting it all to work seamlessly takes effort. BPM makes it a lot easier. Previously, I used to use MediaPortal as my shell to launch stuff. Now I just use BPM. If I need to watch media, I launch XBMC from within BPM. The nice thing about launching applications through BPM is you retain the steam overlay on top of them, even if they're not steam programs. So, within XBMC, if I launch it from BPM, I can pull up the BPM webbrowser or friendslists or all that junk by pressing the Xbox guide button.
EDIT: I fully admit I'm not an average PC user, though. Still, if you have the skill and know how and time to set it all up, the PC experience is so slick.
8/10 would read again.
The bar graph, I mean. It starts at 30m. The 2013 bar looks three times the size of the 2011 bar. When in reality it isn't even twice the number.
It's misleading, like many Fox News graphs.
Even if you were right, how does that make it inflated? Games are games.
games don't count unless they're cinematic FPSRPGs, dude.
Project CARS
rudieboy77
Member
Not to get to far OT, anyone have any experience with Steam in-home streaming to a laptop?
Trolls. Don't feed them.
Well you'd also have to add back the people like me who set themselves to appear offline (to avoid being interrupted) but are playing something. Pretty sure we don't count among the concurrent players.
Techies.
Either the number collapses over the horror of the Techies experience or servers crash from the number of people trying to log in to play the hero.
To a laptop? No. But I will say that with 801.22ac, in-home streaming over Wifi is really good. I stream from the living room to my bedroom. 801.22g is way too slow, and 801.22n is just a tad below what I'd call comfortable, but 801.22ac is great. A big reason it's running so well for me, though, might be because of the CPUs I'm streaming from and to - from an i7 4790 to an i7 4770. Steam in-home streaming doesn't currently allow for hardware decoding, but it'll decode an a separate thread if available.
I'm guessing around 8.5-9 million. There's daily peaks and troughs, weekly peaks and troughs and yearly peaks and troughs for concurrent users. The biggest yearly peak tend to be after Christmas, around January. It drops the most around exam seasons for obvious reasons.
Robottiimu2000
Member
Yeah, and you have to pay for water and food and rent/mortage and your cats food as well.. To enjoy console gaming
/s
Man, you have to recalculate that, if you don't get a very *very* decent rig for 1000-1500$ something is going terribly wrong..
ebullientprism
Member
75 million active users? I think thats up there if not the biggest.
rudieboy77
Member
Hahahaha, I see what you did there.
Pffft... that's 1% of the world population. Still wayyyyyyys to go, Gabe!
you kidding, right?
It never gets old, how people not into MMOs and strategy games dismiss PC gaming out of hand.
and who cares about AAA titles anyway? (><)
Legendarylemur
Member
I guess you could say Steam is... all steamed up
I think the answer here is - nothing in particular. Starting to change a business model from simply continuing to offer good products and letting the growth occur as a consequence of quality to trying to specifically manipulate and drive growth seems to be about when just about all companies start turning to shit. Steam grew from a puddle because they had a vision and focused on that vision instead of focusing solely on their day to day numbers.
I think they should simply keep focusing on what they've already stated they're interested in doing. Further democratizing PC gaming, starting to work to try to turn Linux into a more viable alternative gaming platform and generally just focusing on quality. Let the other companies play their petty market analysis and number chasing games that invariably turns companies away from innovation and onto trying to manipulate a market that's invariably far less predictable than they'd like to pretend with their analytics, focus groups and targeted content.
Robert J. Sullivan
Member
god damn people, learn how to take a joke