Steam Concurrent Users Passes 8 Million

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Nzyme32

Member


To the best of my knowledge Steam passed 7.5 million concurrent users over Christmas but has seemed to peak around 6.8 - 7.2 million since.

Today I noticed they peaked to 8,020,744 concurrent users, today being the final "encore" day of the summer sale.

I'm interested to hear peoples view on what they think about Steam's growth to date, and what events / games could push this further.

For reference, here are the yearly figures that were shown at Dev Days (late January 2014)



Edit: For reference, comparison of gaming accounts:

Nzyme32 said:
So summary:

Google Play Games: 100 million - in 6 months (June 2014)
Steam: 75 million - 30 day active users (Jan 2014) / 186 million total (Arstechnica Crawler estimate April 2014) [65 million 30 day active Oct 2013]
PSN: 110 million accounts (undefined - July 2013)
Xbox Live: 48 million accounts (undefined - may 2013)

Edit: Polygon have cited the thread; neogaf should get press badges for e3 back :p
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P

Piercedveil

Member
Impressive. I'm always still a little bit surprised to hear people in real life talk about Steam or see their shortcut on their desktop. Pretty cool it's becoming much more popular.
 
H

HoosTrax

Member
I'm a curmudgeon when it comes to Steam. I miss the days when the client was army green and you could actually keep up with the number of games released.

I'm interested to hear peoples view on what they think about Steam's growth to date, and what events / games could push this further.
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Well for one thing, I'd think it'd be mutually beneficial for EA to return to Steam. Both in terms of the Steam concurrent count and the EA PC games that seem to be either DOA or dead shortly after launch like Titanfall and PvZ: Garden Warfare. Mutual stubborness preludes that I guess.
 
K

Krejlooc

Banned
Every time I read stuff like this, I imagine gabe n dressed as Rita repulsa throwing his staff down screaming, "magic wand, make my monster grow!"

Which is to say, go, you beautiful bastard, go!

Edit: in the last year, my father has joined steam, my sister and her family, and I've built two of my friends gaming pcs. That's 4 groupsofpeople alone that I know who have finally jumped aboard after years of hearing me evangelize the service.
 
K

kswiston

Member
Sothpaw said:
Been a member since 2004 and have loved it since.

PC gaming dead confirmed.
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I feel like PC gaming had a resurgence between 2007-2009 and has continued to build from there. I joined Steam in 2008, and at the time, we weren't blowing through a Steam thread a month, or like 4-5 during major sales.
 
K

Krejlooc

Banned
Mass Effect said:
Oh, yep you're right. So +1 million in less than 8 months? The rate of growth is crazy, and only getting faster.
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The growth rate might even be higher because this is just concurrent online users. If it was 75 million active users in january, I wonder what it's at right now.
 
S

Sothpaw

Member
kswiston said:
I feel like PC gaming had a resurgence between 2007-2009 and has continued to build from there. I joined Steam in 2008, and at the time, we weren't blowing through a Steam thread a month, or like 4-5 during major sales.
Click to expand...

WOW was an unstoppable titan back then also.
 
K

kswiston

Member
Krejlooc said:
The growth rate might even be higher because this is just concurrent online users. If it was 75 million active users in january, I wonder what it's at right now.
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considering that the user account number is growing a lot faster than the concurrent users, I wonder if Steam is gaining traction in the Eastern Hemisphere. I know it has been big in Russia for awhile, but what about the rest of Asia?
 
S

Stripper13

Member
Not to downplay this, but I have Steam running on my PC effectively 24/7 and have only actively used it once since the PS4 launch (a bot match with a friend who is new to Dota).

So it's 8 million concurrent users - 1 if I'm the only one.
 
K

Krejlooc

Banned
kswiston said:
considering that the user account number is growing a lot faster than the concurrent users, I wonder if Steam is gaining traction in the Eastern Hemisphere. I know it has been big in Russia for awhile, but what about the rest of Asia?
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They mentioned at Steam Dev Days that they're making a big push into China. They see China as the holy grail right now, as it's a market that primarily PC gaming first (for obvious reasons). They actually cited their success in a piracy-rich area like Russia as a factor which made them consider China. I would expect that they'll probably trump the results of them pushing into China next january.

They had an interesting statistic during their session about VOGL where they talked about the number of people in China with DX11 GPUs, who were stuck with DX9 because Windows XP is still vastly dominates China. That means there is a big market in china with gaming-class PCs.
 
K

Krejlooc

Banned
Stripper13 said:
Not to downplay this, but I have Steam running on my PC effectively 24/7 and have only actively used it once since the PS4 launch (a bot match with a friend who is new to Dota).

So it's 8 million concurrent users - 1 if I'm the only one.
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This sort of stuff goes both ways. Like, when Sony hypes up the number of PSN accounts they have, do they mention that I have 2 - one for North America and one for Japan, and that I don't subscribe to PS+ at all hence I cannot play online with my PS4?

You're right that one shouldn't read too much into the statistic, but the fact that 8 million people are running their client at once is still a testament to how far their client has proliferated. Did anybody really expect this when Steam first launched? I know I sure as hell didn't.

r3n4ud said:
Eh? If you don't self-build, you're doing it wrong.
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I have a $2000 self-built PC. It just demolishes all my consoles and sports cutting edge VR lol.
 
Prophane33

Prophane33

Member
r3n4ud said:
Eh? If you don't self-build, you're doing it wrong.
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In my 16+ years of PC gaming I've never built a computer myself and never will; you can get a decent custom built computer for less than 1000 easy. Always hated people assuming you needed to spend anything over 1000 dollars on a gaming PC. It's the people that walk into Best Buy and spend far too much on computers that make pre-built computers look bad. You can find deals on Dell or other makers on custom built machines and build something with a good warranty without breaking the bank. The "building it yourself" idea is great, but not everyone is comfortable doing things like that (hell, I can't even built a bookshelf) nor do they have to. I'm not skittish about sticking in more ram or a video card, but building a computer from a barebones kit or whatnot is not going to ever happen for me. I do admit that if one is motivated enough they can save a good chunk of money by building it themselves, I'm just not a fan of the exceptionalism/elitism that comes from that camp. (though the PC gaming is too expensive crowd is the absolute worst-- next to console only gamers :p ).
 
K

kswiston

Member
Prophane33 said:
In my 16+ years of PC gaming I've never built a computer myself and never will; you can get a decent custom built computer for less than 1000 easy. Always hated people assuming you needed to spend anything over 1000 dollars on a gaming PC. It's the people that walk into Best Buy and spend far too much on computers that make pre-built computers look bad. You can find deals on Dell or other makers on custom built machines and build something with a good warranty without breaking the bank. The "building it yourself" idea is great, but not everyone is comfortable doing things like that (hell, I can't even built a bookshelf) nor do they have to. I'm not skittish about sticking in more ram or a video card, but building a computer from a barebones kit or whatnot is not going to ever happen for me. I do admit that if one is motivated enough they can save a good chunk of money by building it themselves, just not a fan of the exceptionalism/elitism that comes from that camp. (though the PC gaming is too expensive crowd is the absolute worst-- next to console only gamers :p ).
Click to expand...

There are sites that let you "build your own computer" from whatever components you want, and then an extra $50-100 to have it actually put together. That's the route I would go if I wasn't comfortable doing it myself.
 
C

Ceebs

Member
If you are going "Wow PC gaming" don't forget to consider the whatever percentage of the 25 million daily LoL players who do not use Steam.

That game's concurrent player count blows my mind.
 
L

low-G

Member
whenever I've built my own gaming PC it's been a poorly wired semi-mess. My hands are too large. Last gaming PC was marked up $100 off of having just built it myself, and it was tested for me and professionally wired. Saved me a day of work and a lot of freaking out, so it's worth it IMO.

Also, I can't stand the thought of accidentally wrecking a CPU because of some small fumble of hands and being out hundreds of $$$$.
 
K

Krejlooc

Banned
Ceebs said:
If you are going "Wow PC gaming" don't forget to consider the whatever percentage of the 25 million daily LoL players who do not use Steam.

That game's concurrent player count blows my mind.
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And then, when that's blowing your mind, think about all the other Korean and TenCent games like CrossFire.
 
N

Nzyme32

Member
Einbroch said:
We Fox News now.
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Not sure where you are going with this? Concurrent users (which today past 8 million) and active user accounts are two statistics that have relatively well tracked data, giving a good look at Steam's growth. They do have numbers for "Currently in-game" vs "Currently Online" but I have yet to see comparisons per year / month.

Of course the data has it's downsides as does every published metric from every platform regarding account numbers, online players etc. Definitions of "Active" users are often different, and peoples ability to be counted as a concurrent or online user despite possibly being idle may muddle numbers to varying degrees. If the metrics do not change, comparisons can still be made per platform to discuss growth.
 
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