Valve has published a blog post looking back at Steam in 2020. The blog post begins by recognizing the unique situation we all live in, and that these must be taken into account in the exceptional numbers of the past year.

"Steam was experiencing significant growth in 2020 even before the COVID-19 lockdown, but as people began staying home, video game playing time skyrocketed and the number of customers buying and playing games increased dramatically.

The year saw user activity including monthly active users (120.4 million), daily active users (62.6 million), peak concurrent users (24.8 million), first-time buyers (2.6 million per month), and games purchased (up 21.4% from 2019). Steam hit record highs in all areas.

Valve also noted in this developer post that, aside from large sale events breaking overall revenue generation records, there was a 36 percent increase in games that generated over $100,000 in revenue from the 2019 Winter Sale to the equivalent sale in 2020.

VR has its own statistics, with game sales up 71 percent year over year, with Half-Life: Alyx accounting for 39 percent of that growth; 1.7 million people played VR games for the first time in 2020; "there were over 104 million PC VR sessions last year, each session averaged about 32 minutes, and total play time increased by 30 percent." This is 55,466,666 total hours spent in (Steam) VR.

The post also mentions PC Gamer's own PC Gaming Show as part of Valve's theme of partnering with a wider range of conferences and conventions thanks to Pandemic (thanks!) Looking forward to the future: "We look forward to working with organizations to bring even more community events to life through Steam this year."

There is an interesting aside in this review about the impact of the pandemic on Internet traffic.

"Government agencies in various countries have approached us and other major Internet companies to help mitigate the increase in global traffic that ISPs are seeing. In response, we've made some changes to make bandwidth more manageable during work and commute times and to postpone updates to the evenings."

The post concludes with a few notes about what Steam will be doing in 2021, reaffirming its commitment to improving game compatibility for Linux through Steam Play, along with its partner Perfect World, It includes an announcement that Valve will launch Steam China in early 2021. The platform will be "almost completely independent of Steam." see the full blog post looking back on 2020 here.