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Steam monthly active users now at 67 million compared to 70 million for PSN

Gamezone

Gamezone

Gold Member
How much can it continue to grow before companies like EA to realise that they might be losing money by not allowing their games on Steam?
 
1

120v

Member
Gamezone said:
How much can it continue to grow before companies like EA to realise that they might be losing money by not allowing their games on Steam?
Click to expand...

i can't imagine anybody would skip over battlefield or whatever simply because it's not on steam. maybe when PC overtakes the marketshare or something
 
U

Urthor

Member
Gamezone said:
How much can it continue to grow before companies like EA to realise that they might be losing money by not allowing their games on Steam?
Click to expand...

Valve takes a 30% cut from any EA game on Steam, on Origin EA earns 30% more for their games. Plus, EA controls the advertising and can expose customers to exclusively other EA games in menus and with sales and the like.

The increase in PC revenue for EA games going onto Steam would have to be massive for EA to drop support for their Origin platform. EA knows they are losing sales, but they're probably not losing revenue, because 90% of the market who wants to play Battlefield 1 will just download Origin to play it, they're only losing out on a sliver of sales and taking 100% of the sale sticker for it because they're not giving the retailer a cut. And they're building momentum for their own retail store to boot.
 
B

Bad7667

Member
Urthor said:
Yeah the problem with this math is something very simple. Internet cafes.

Yes, Steam has 67 million accounts connected to the internet on a monthly basis. But how many of those are from internet cafes in China and Korea where Steam is a platform for Dota2 and PUBG? Quite a lot more than likely.

Those aren't *monetised users* who realistically are going to buy a 60 dollar AAA game from their storefront and are part of the same install base a Playstation 3 or Playstation 4 console is. Nor are they high spending first world customers, they're internet cafe users who have a much more limited spending habits for their games than play from home users in developed Western countries.

In contrast, for Sony their 70 million user base is far more valuable. Playstation install base is much more focused in developed countries and that 70 million will consist of far more people participating in the mainstream boxed game market, and not the internet cafe gaming culture of Korea/China/Asia in general. And 100% of that 70 million install base is buying discrete games for their platform because that's the only way to enjoy the platform, either through brick and mortar retail channel or through digital delivery. In contrast, a large proportion of Valve's channel are internet cafe's running out Dota2 for free to Chinese customers or buying PUBG keys once for their cafe, the second is pretty much the reason PUBG has almost never gone on sale.

There's a lot more spending power in Sony's base, and a lot less China involved in general, these numbers don't indicate a tip towards PC as a platform in the Western boxed game market, and by all reports the Western PC boxed game market has plateaued recently, there have been several reports of Valve's overall revenues being stable in the last few years. The growth segment has all been in games as a service.

So tl;dr don't take these numbers as either PC gaming or Valve "winning" the console war, there's a helluva lot more to them because their numbers are driven by PUBG and Dota2 in China which is not a place where selling discrete 60 dollar games to an install base is a thing. There is probably some minor growth in the discrete gaming install base for Valve but no massive upheaval in the shape of the market.
Click to expand...

One thing you're not accounting for is how much money these free to play games make.

If Dota 2 makes more money for Valve in a year than most boxed games, why does that not make the game just as valuable to Valve as Uncharted is for Sony?

It seems to me you are deciding arbitrarily that the "mass market boxed games" are more valuable games. On console sure. But on PC, where league of legends makes more money than almost every 60$ game on any platform, I'm not sure why these games don't count just because they are free.

Edit: forgot to adress the PUBG comment. The reason PUBG hasn't gone on sale has nothing to do with internet cafe's buying cheap keys, and everything to do with the insane sales numbers they get every month. When your game is selling as many copies as PUBG is at the moment, you don't make it cheaper.
 
Futaleufu

Futaleufu

Member
120v said:
i can't imagine anybody would skip over battlefield or whatever simply because it's not on steam. maybe when PC overtakes the marketshare or something
Click to expand...

There is people like me who stopped buying new EA games when they left Steam. The only reason I own Battlefield 3 is because HumbleBundle happened.

I bought NFS Shift and Shift 2 on the last Steam sale.

Urthor said:
Valve takes a 30% cut from any EA game on Steam, on Origin EA earns 30% more for their games. Plus, EA controls the advertising and can expose customers to exclusively other EA games in menus and with sales and the like.

The increase in PC revenue for EA games going onto Steam would have to be massive for EA to drop support for their Origin platform. EA knows they are losing sales, but they're probably not losing revenue, because 90% of the market who wants to play Battlefield 1 will just download Origin to play it, they're only losing out on a sliver of sales and taking 100% of the sale sticker for it because they're not giving the retailer a cut. And they're building momentum for their own retail store to boot.
Click to expand...

I don't want EA dropping Origin, I want EA to put their games on Steam, like Ubisoft does.
 
A

Abilidebob

Member
Rayge said:
Doesn't STEAM automatically download and start up a game at least once a month without PC users actually doing anything? These numbers are definitely bloated if this is true.
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Exactly. I spent 5 months without playing DOTA 2, suddenly I got a message from a friend congratulating me for getting to 4k MMR. Fucking Valve.
 
P

pretty done

Member
Nice to see the two best gaming platforms at the top. Steam has come a LONG way since those dark 2004 days, that's for sure.

Also hilarious to see some of you fanboys arguing over fucking monthly active users. Between people claiming Steam runs games for you once a month to get active users, and people crying that PSP/PSV/PS3 (lol three dead ass platforms) users are counted in PSN's numbers I'm not sure which side is more pathetic.
 
H

hanspampel

Banned
pretty done said:
Nice to see the two best gaming platforms at the top. Steam has come a LONG way since those dark 2004 days, that's for sure.

Also hilarious to see some of you fanboys arguing over fucking monthly active users. Between people claiming Steam runs games for you once a month to get active users, and people crying that PSP/PSV/PS3 (lol three dead ass platforms) users are counted in PSN's numbers I'm not sure which side is more pathetic.
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Lol
 
ArtHands

ArtHands

Thinks buying more servers can fix a bad patch
Spyder_Monkey said:
Everybody has a computer though. It's easy to buy and try running a game regardless of hardware capability.
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From what I see in VR threads, I dont think everyone has a computer.

"You need a $1500 high end pc to run oculus rift/htc vive! Thats expensive!" Is what i read most of the time
 
J

jholmes

Member
My mom was in my house last night and used my PS3 to play a DVD so I guess that would make me an active PSN user. These numbers are nice guidelines but obviously they're somewhat inflated, not all of those people are regularly playing and buying games.
 
M

Mivey

Member
Rayge said:
Doesn't STEAM automatically download and start up a game at least once a month without PC users actually doing anything? These numbers are definitely bloated if this is true.
Click to expand...
Come on, stop spreading FUD! It only does that if it detects the user is female and has grandchildren. In that case, even Windows 10 directly installs Steam during the first setup
 
U

Urthor

Member
Bad7667 said:
One thing you're not accounting for is how much money these free to play games make.

If Dota 2 makes more money for Valve in a year than most boxed games, why does that not make the game just as valuable to Valve as Uncharted is for Sony?

It seems to me you are deciding arbitrarily that the "mass market boxed games" are more valuable games. On console sure. But on PC, where league of legends makes more money than almost every 60$ game on any platform, I'm not sure why these games don't count just because they are free.
Click to expand...

Two things. One is in the context of the console wars, those Chinese users aren't "drawing" developers to make PC games lead platform like a Western user who earns Valve revenue from buying Skyrim season pass every Christmas on November the 10th would. They're in a different space and market segment and aren't going to be manipulating, say, Rockstar's decision on whether to port Red Dead Redemption 1.

Many people assume what's good for Valve is also good for PC gamers because it brings more ports over because the Steam revenue pie expands, but that isn't necessarily the case.

Two, a Dota2 or PUBG player in Asia, while they make Valve a sum on the whole, absolutely aren't worth the same per player as Sony's game division. Sony's Playstation business as a whole earnt 15 billion US dollars FY 2016, Valve's total revenue is estimated at around 3-4 billion annually by industry watchers although they're a private company

The 63 Steam users vs 70 million Playstation users does not reflect the wide gap between those numbers, and it would be highly misleading to assume that the gap is closing in the discrete game segment. Even if you look at the behemoth that is League, the game industry watchers estimate revenue between 2 and 3 billion, it does that with 100 million active monthly players, more than the entire Playstation ecosystem, because it has a privileged position in China.

Though it might seem like League of Legends might earn more than any single AAA release, but the spending habits of League of Legend's customers per head don't outweigh the spending habits of Playstation customers per head by any means.

Futaleufu said:
I don't want EA dropping Origin, I want EA to put their games on Steam, like Ubisoft does.
Click to expand...


Then you are going to have to see a collapse in spending on Origin and a growth in spending on discrete game on Steam in the order of a 20-30% swing I'd think. And that's frankly not happening, Origin is probably gaining more acceptance as time goes on and eating into Steam's monopoly more than anything. It's UI is pretty good and behemoths like Battlefield 1 and FIFA Ultimate are bringing in users and growing the ecosystem year on year.

So tl;dr RIP isn't happening unfortunately
 
A

Armaros

Member
Urthor said:
Two things. One is in the context of the console wars, those Chinese users aren't "drawing" developers to make PC games lead platform like a Western user who earns Valve revenue from buying Skyrim season pass every Christmas on November the 10th would. They're in a different space and market segment and aren't going to be manipulating, say, Rockstar's decision on whether to port Red Dead Redemption 1.

Many people assume what's good for Valve is also good for PC gamers because it brings more ports over because the Steam revenue pie expands, but that isn't necessarily the case.

Two, a Dota2 or PUBG player in Asia, while they make Valve a sum on the whole, absolutely aren't worth the same per player as Sony's game division. Sony's Playstation business as a whole earnt 15 billion US dollars FY 2016, Valve's total revenue is estimated at around 3-4 billion annually by industry watchers although they're a private company

The 63 Steam users vs 70 million Playstation users does not reflect the wide gap between those numbers, and it would be highly misleading to assume that the gap is closing in the discrete game segment. Even if you look at the behemoth that is League, the game industry watchers estimate revenue between 2 and 3 billion for, it does that with 100 million active monthly players, more than the entire Playstation ecosystem, because it has a privileged position in China.

Though it might seem like League of Legends might earn more than any single AAA release, but the spending habits of League of Legend's customers per head don't outweigh the spending habits of Playstation customers per head by any means.
Click to expand...

League of Legends makes revenue on the scale of the money that the platform holders make from owning and controlling an entire console platform and getting money from every game sold, from just one online PC game.

Without the overhead that comes from paying for manufacturing hardware.

Any of the platform holders would kill to own League and have their numbers if given the chance.
 
ArtHands

ArtHands

Thinks buying more servers can fix a bad patch
Urthor said:
Two things. One is in the context of the console wars, those Chinese users aren't "drawing" developers to make PC games lead platform like a Western user who earns Valve revenue from buying Skyrim season pass every Christmas on November the 10th would. They're in a different space and market segment and aren't going to be manipulating, say, Rockstar's decision on whether to port Red Dead Redemption 1.

Many people assume what's good for Valve is also good for PC gamers because it brings more ports over because the Steam revenue pie expands, but that isn't necessarily the case.

Two, a Dota2 or PUBG player in Asia, while they make Valve a sum on the whole, absolutely aren't worth the same per player as Sony's game division. Sony's Playstation business as a whole earnt 15 billion US dollars FY 2016, Valve's total revenue is estimated at around 3-4 billion annually by industry watchers although they're a private company

The 63 Steam users vs 70 million Playstation users does not reflect the wide gap between those numbers, and it would be highly misleading to assume that the gap is closing in the discrete game segment. Even if you look at the behemoth that is League, the game industry watchers estimate revenue between 2 and 3 billion, it does that with 100 million active monthly players, more than the entire Playstation ecosystem, because it has a privileged position in China.

Though it might seem like League of Legends might earn more than any single AAA release, but the spending habits of League of Legend's customers per head don't outweigh the spending habits of Playstation customers per head by any means.




Then you are going to have to see a collapse in spending on Origin and a growth in spending on discrete game on Steam in the order of a 20-30% swing I'd think. And that's frankly not happening, Origin is probably gaining more acceptance as time goes on and eating into Steam's monopoly more than anything. It's UI is pretty good and behemoths like Battlefield 1 and FIFA Ultimate are bringing in users and growing the ecosystem year on year.

So tl;dr RIP isn't happening unfortunately
Click to expand...

From this conclusion, PC gamers gets better game deal especially thanks to Steam sales, while Sony is racking in more money thanks to their subscription service (that is provided free on PC), hardware peripherals and console sales and higher game price I guess....?
 
U

Unai

Member
Grief.exe said:
Valve is actually relatively open about this number, relative to their console counterparts. They count "Active Users" as someone who owns a game and has played a game within the last month. So "Total Users' is actually significantly higher.
Click to expand...

Out of curiosity, do you have a source for that?
 
U

Urthor

Member
Armaros said:
League of Legends makes revenue on the scale of the money that the platform holders make from owning and controlling an entire console platform and getting money from every game sold, from just one online PC game.

Without the overhead that comes from paying for manufacturing hardware.

Any of the platform holders would kill to own League and have their numbers if given the chance.
Click to expand...

I mean League is doing it unfairly you have to remember. A large part of the overall gaming market is Tencent and Alibaba selling really shitty PC games to Chinese internet cafes because the vast majority of Western AAAs like Call of Duty are banned by Chinese government. League of Legends is 80% owned by Tencent after they bought out the venture capital guys in 2011 and thus basically isn't censored by China because political connections.

Crossing that divide is actually just hard, and the level of exposure League gets is amazing because the internet cafe ecosystem is totally different to the Western system, it's far more winner take all. Gametrics.com has the Korean numbers for most played game in internet cafe's and is fairly illuminating.
 
A

Armaros

Member
Urthor said:
I mean League is doing it unfairly you have to remember. A large part of the overall gaming market is Tencent and Alibaba selling really shitty PC games to Chinese internet cafes because the vast majority of Western AAAs like Call of Duty are banned by Chinese government. League of Legends is 80% owned by Tencent after they bought out the venture capital guys in 2011 and thus basically isn't censored by China because political connections.

Crossing that divide is actually just hard, and the level of exposure League gets is amazing because the internet cafe ecosystem is totally different to the Western system, it's far more winner take all. Gametrics.com has the Korean numbers for most played game in internet cafe's and is fairly illuminating.
Click to expand...

Thats just making excuses and moving goal posts when the topic was revenue and you trying to downplay it and push up Playstation.
 
U

Urthor

Member
Armaros said:
Thats just making excuses and moving goal posts when the topic was revenue and you trying to downplay it and push up Playstation.
Click to expand...

I don't even own a Playstation or am a big believer in Sony, I'm just making a point about the title. Getting exposure to the Chinese market in a big way through exposure on the homepage of Chinese Google/Amazon style conglomerate in Tencent is something that no other game in the world has.

All I'm saying is that these headline numbers don't change the status quo that much, and aren't an indication that the status quo is moving for discrete games. I'm not shilling for Sony because fanboy
 
A

Abilidebob

Member
Urthor said:
I mean League is doing it unfairly you have to remember. A large part of the overall gaming market is Tencent and Alibaba selling really shitty PC games to Chinese internet cafes because the vast majority of Western AAAs like Call of Duty are banned by Chinese government. League of Legends is 80% owned by Tencent after they bought out the venture capital guys in 2011 and thus basically isn't censored by China because political connections.

Crossing that divide is actually just hard, and the level of exposure League gets is amazing because the internet cafe ecosystem is totally different to the Western system, it's far more winner take all. Gametrics.com has the Korean numbers for most played game in internet cafe's and is fairly illuminating.
Click to expand...

You need to be absolutely delusional to suggest what I think you're suggesting, that LoL isn't supremely big every fucking where and only on China and SK. Oh I forgot that West = US.
 
ArtHands

ArtHands

Thinks buying more servers can fix a bad patch
Rayge said:
Doesn't STEAM automatically download and start up a game at least once a month without PC users actually doing anything? These numbers are definitely bloated if this is true.
Click to expand...

I also heard Steam phone app automatically download itself to your Smartphone too 😡
 
I

Icarus

Member
methinks those numbers will come down a bit or at least slow the growth once the government in China blocks Steam...
 
U

Urthor

Member
Abilidebob said:
You need to be absolutely delusional to suggest what I think you're suggesting, that LoL isn't supremely big every fucking where and only on China and SK. Oh I forgot that West = US.
Click to expand...

LoL is massive everywhere but the US where it's actually quite small relative to rest of world.

It still has 88% of its players in China. That's not to say Turkey or SEA or Europe are small, but China is that massive.
 
H

Hektor

Member
Everyone who thinks steam got a monopoly literally doesn't know what that words means.

It's an oligopol at most and even that's stretching it given how even steamkeys can be generated and sold without giving money to valve by devs and third party stores.
 
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