I don't have a source, but I remember there being talk of a paid/bought game being required on a Steam account to count it as active.
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Steam now has over 125 million active accounts
- Thread starter jambo
- Start date
I don't have a source, but I remember there being talk of a paid/bought game being required on a Steam account to count it as active.
The Shogun
Banned
3rd party devs are making plenty of cash on Steam.
Or have you been ignoring everyones financial earnings / release slate on PC lately
Edit - you edited you post before I could post my thoughts
Then your questions appear a non-sequitur.
jellies_two
Member
But the thing is, ignoring for a moment the bulk of steam installs that inherited launch on login (like mine), if at any point a steam user sets it to launch automatically then like a monthly subscription, that tends to linger. And if you're not a control freak type user you just leave it like that even if you have an account with steam, and some games in your library.
I'm trying to reconcile 125 million "active" user with day time peak concurrent gaming sessions.
Active users IMO should be ones whose "time played" counter is actually increasing each month, by some minimal set amount, or people who paid more than zero dollars in the last 30 days..
Mithos
Member
Did they not change that last year to three month I think e had a big discussion back then, but I'm not 100% sure (just asking)?
Steam/Valve also has Dota 2 which helps its presence in Asia where consoles are generally less popular .
i thought it was too much of a tangent, but yes, developers are making money on steam, but nowhere near the level valve does, and valve won't ever give third parties the ability to do so unless they become just a processing API.
For a game to be percieved as having high value on Steam, you have to put so much helps-Valve things in it that instantly devalues other-store copies of the game in customer's eyes. I don't like it when I hear someone doesn't want to buy a game on steam because it won't give you jpg trading cards, for example.
I have a 4-digit Steam ID that I constantly get badgered for, AND I have at least one game I worked on being published on Steam shortly, so I'm not just saying this shit for shit's sake. I'm just calling Steam's shenigans for what they are.
It's not even a matter of monetisation. The metric is simply what it is - active accounts, potential customers, state of the community on Steam. Those customers could just spend the majority of their time on F2P games, but they still provide value for the community as players. That is part of the value of this metric.
Getting metrics for CC info, purchasing habits etc is entirely different and something that many companies don't provide or elaborate well on.
No, its 30 days.
OverturePT
Member
I don't see why, they are all potential buyers who have logged in in the last 30 days. No one asks how many dollars the 18M something PS4 users spend to justify the size of the user base. 125M people logged in in 30 days, 125M potential buyers, everyone must like to have numbers like that. It's huge, whichever way people want to look at it.
It would be nice to get the average spending per user, sure, but it's crazy how people downplay these numbers.
GifGafIsTheBestGaf
Member
DotA 3 before HL3 confirmed
But seriously, this is crazy
But seriously, this is crazy
The Shogun
Banned
Apple provides credit card attach numbers publically, and first party supplies attach rates publically for all 3 consoles
Either way, I'll just drop it now. But Steam doesn't have 125 million potential customers, it's simply accounts created and logged in, which a ton of bots are. Actual third party scrapes and actual top game UUs paint a much more modest and realistic picture of Steam.
So what? The thread is simply about active accounts and is comparable to the previous statements of the same metrics.
You want completely different metrics, you won't get it in this thread. There are plenty of things Valve as a company won't state. They are a private company and not obligated to, so can do what they want.
SneakyStephan
Banned
Cpus have been more than powerful enough for internet+office+youtube since 2008
For anyone who doesn't play game or use it for video editing or other demanding stuff a pc is like a fridge now... you can use it for like ten years without ever feeling you need a faster one.
If there is no incentive for people to upgrade then ofcourse sales will drop.
Progress in CPU performance has been at an almost complete standstill since 2011, so even people who need more powerful pcs have little reason to upgrade the entire thing, they'll probably just put a newer gpu , an ssd etc in their old pc
Ask people in the need a new pc threads, pretty much everyone with an i5 from 2011 or even an i7 920 from 2009 feels like their cpu (and by extension their mobo + ram) are still fine.
Also OEM sales are dropping... but what OEMs are even counted? Just dell HP etc?
Every single pc store offers their own prebuilt pcs now that don't belong to any big OEM.
It's easier (and people now aren't terrified of computers like they were 20 years ago) to build one yourself than it ever was, and since it's so much cheaper anyone who is a bit computer savvy will go that route instead of get ripped off by Dell and co.
There's many reasons for pc OEM sales to drop.
I'd say a pc no longer being a slow piece of shit that immediately feels outdated is probably the biggest factor.
Also saturation was bound to happen eventually, there's only so many people on the planet... when they all already have one then what.
Phones are going to go that way too once the hardware becomes good enough to do everything you could do on a desktop in 2009 with the same ease and performance.
Sales for those are going to slow down too, same with tablets.
(just kidding they have planned obsolesence built in with 2000mah non replaceable batteries and OS updates that make the thing so slow it might as well have bricked it)
ebullientprism
Member
This. So much.
Its mind boggling that a company as big as Steam/Valve has CS that feels like 2 guys copy pasting emails. Like WTF. Get some phone support in there FFS! Or at least a live chat. Even EA has that.
valve is tiiiiiiny.
Mithos
Member
Forerunner
Member
Steam is love, Steam is life.
Seriously though, it's a great platform. It'll be 12 years in September.
Seriously though, it's a great platform. It'll be 12 years in September.
It is sort of mind-boggling how small they are compared to their estimated worth
SneakyStephan
Banned
League of legends gets like 6 (edit , 7.5) million consecutive users online.
That is ONE game, that isn't even on steam.
Also your 'spent money on games that aren't dota or tf2? how arbitrary can your requirements get for a valid user in your mind? I sense a bit of an agenda here
Yeah, those would be registered acocunts, which are up probably over 300 million by now.
BUT what ars found is that they had to take into acocunt ALL registered users in roder to have their estimates meet up with what devs where tellign them.
It wasn't enough to take just the "Active" accounts into well, account. So those other accounts ARE buying games.
Whether or not they are crap is a bit subjective. With 4500 games there is something for everyone. That is the benefit of having a lot of games. And it doesn't matter if people are online or not. The world is round and it spins. There are a lot of time zones. When and what people play is irrelevant. The point is they are part of the ecosystem which keeps growing at a very high rate.
Yeah for sure. I mean a user could buy 30 or 40 games and then not use Steam for 4 or 5 months, or just be using offline modes or playing DRM free titles that open outside of Steam; they would still be classed as inactive even though they remain purchasing customers
HP_Wuvcraft
Banned
It's sort of mind-boggling that they don't hire more people since they have the money and the need.
Why CSGO? It's not free to play.
And that was one year ago stat for LoL.
Not to mention mobile games like Clash of Clans and PazuDora are raking over 1 billion of revenue per year. People tend to forget there is a world outside of console gaming and it's primary markets are basically limited to US + Western EU + Japan. And the last one is on the process of bailing out of this oligopolistic industry.
Welfare
Member
We have to rule out the most popular games. Come on get with the program.
TouchMyBox
Member
That's like 1/8th of Facebook.
That's pretty impressive.
That's pretty impressive.
PC gaming/enthusiast market has been booming though, even if overal PC sales are declining. Also, you have to see that many people opt for building their own, or get one from a store where they custom build it. Those won't get in the PC sales statistics.
1st Course
Member
Less. Facebook has 1.39 billion monthly active users as of December 31, 2014.
CountAntonius
Member
FearlessBelgian
Member
Its awesome ! Long live to Steam !
7DollarHagane
Banned
Ive been playing a lot of CS:Go lately and it always amazes me to see how they have something like 6 million unique users to that game a month.
There are a lot of people with smurf accounts and alts on that game too but even 3 million unique users is pretty amazing.
There are a lot of people with smurf accounts and alts on that game too but even 3 million unique users is pretty amazing.
texhnolyze
Banned
Because CSGO is not a real game.
Because people don't spend money on TF2 and Dota 2.
Because AAA console games are the real games.
Heh.
Buggy Loop
Member
But PC gaming is dead!
LiquidMetal14
hide your water-based mammals
Was on the great days on the 90's AMD took a brief hiatus from about 02-04 but ever since then I have been building my rigs. It's been great to see the marker resurging and thriving. Still growing too.
SystemUser
Member
I remember when Steam hadn't hit full speed yet. Lots of people were saying that PC gaming was ready to die when the Xbox 360 launched so strong and with MS's botched launch of Games for Windows Live. Now it seems more likely for consoles to go away before PC gaming.
Consoles will go away. You will just have digital platforms going at one another with their exclusives and gimmicks.
alexandros
Banned
What I find more interesting is the fact that Steam is showing explosive growth at a time where normally it should be experiencing some sort of contraction or at least a slowed down growth due to the arrival of next Gen consoles. Steam and PC gaming in general seem completely unfazed by the launch of these new platforms. I wonder why that is.
Wiktor
Member
Gaming ones aren't. The market for pcgaming computers and parts is growing fast.
What is declining is overall sales of PCs, but even that has stabilized recently and most of all, when analytic companies report those sales of PCs they only mean laptops and pre-build desktops. They don't factor in all the computers people built themselves (or let shops build for them) and they don't count upgrades either. So they're pretty useless numbers as far as gaming pcs go.
Wiktor
Member
Consoles are niche market. Extremely profitable, but niche market. PC gaming has grown to much for any console launch to make any significant dent. Not anymore. The ammount of people who game on PCs completely and utterly dwarfs console gamers these days.
Imp the Dimp
Member
PC Gaming since ~2009 has been the best gaming platform in history.
jim-jam bongs
Member
Could the launch of a whole swathe of new currencies have anything to do with the sudden jump?
This gif never ceases to crack me up.
Randomizer123454444
Member
+50 million since January 2014? That's a lot, from 75mil to 125mil in little more than 1 year. What happened in 2014, that made this growth happen?