Anyone even marginally involved in gaming can tell you what Steam is. The gaming library has become nothing short of a household name in the gaming niche. It sports a seemingly endless stream of video games of any type you can think of.

Tons of people appreciate the access to myriad gaming titles they enjoy through Steam. So, we thought it appropriate to give you a little tribute to this platform with 31 intriguing Steam statistics.

Now, Valve, the company behind Steam, keeps the bulk of Steam-related data under wraps. However, we managed to dig up the most interesting and actionable pieces of information for your perusing pleasure. Enjoy!

Steam Stats: Editor’s Pick

  • A game with 1,000 reviews on Steam will likely sell between 20,000 and 60,000 copies.
  • Steam is available in 26 languages.
  • Steam’s PC users have played a total of over 20 billion hours in 2019.
  • A mere 100 games accounted for half of Steam’s entire revenue in 2017.
  • The most users Steam has had in 2020 is 24,535,923.
  • The account with the longest playtime on Steam currently has 1,756,632 hours of playtime.

Steam Statistics: Revenue, Market Size, and More

1. There is an average of 63 sales for every review on a Steam game.

Steam doesn’t have a habit of disclosing concrete sales figures for the games on its platform. People’s desire to know is only matched by their ingenuity, however. Through countless data wrangling, we can now get a pretty good estimate of a game’s sales by looking at its reviews.This technique of projecting Steam game sales statistics reveals that every review on Steam translates into an average of 63 sales.

2. In 2019, Steam’s sales revenue dipped by an estimated 47%.

Although known as the de facto king of gaming distribution, Valve has actually struggled to stay king of the hill lately. One of the heftier blows to its ruling status came in the form of the Epic Game Store, which managed to snatch away a large chunk of titles and companies from Steam.

This, along with criticisms about moderation and earning share models, has contributed to Steam’s revenue to slump by 47%. But, though wobbled, Steam’s foothold in the industry is still secure for now.

3. In 2017, Steam users’ purchasing value equaled $4.3 billion.

In 2017, Steam was well on its way up. That was the year when it reached a new height of $4.3 billion in sales. And that’s just counting profit from vanilla games. It doesn’t even include things like DLC packs and in-game purchases.

At that moment, Steam’s market share was at least 18%, supposing you only count the base game sales. With other factors included, the percentage would certainly go way past this estimate.

4. A game with 1,000 reviews on Steam will likely sell between 20,000 and 60,000 copies.

As we’ve already touched on a few stats back, Valve doesn’t divulge the information about how much the games on Steam sell. We also noted that some experts have come up with effective ways to deduce the rough amount of sales a game has made.That data states that a review equals 63 sales on average, but the estimate becomes broader with more reviews. So, according to the Steam sales statistics we can glean, 1,000 reviews on a game should mean it sold somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000 copies.

5. When Half-Life: Alyx launched, VR usage jumped from 1.3% to 1.93%.

The hype for the next Half-Life had been boiling ever since the 2004 release of Half-Life 2. Valve’s choice to make the next title a VR flagship got mixed reactions, but it did align with the company’s history of pushing the limits of hardware and gameplay conventions.So, as expected, the advent of Half-Life: Alyx led to a spike in VR hardware use. The Steam growth rate data for VR usage grew from 1.3% to 1.93%, which was a near-50% increase.

6. The average refund rate on Steam is around 8-9%.

Based on developers’ and analysts’ experience with the platform, refund rates for a game on Steam can range from 4% all the way up to 20% (with outliers going beyond the ballpark, of course).

With this and other Steam refund statistics in mind, experts came to an average refund rate of 8-9%. Anything significantly beyond that calls for a look at reviews to find out what gripes buyers have with the game in question.

7. Steam is available in 26 languages.

Steam is known the world over, dotting computers across continents. As such, it caters to a wide range of language speakers. To accommodate them, Valve has been churning out different language versions of their program for a while now.

We tallied the current Steam language statistics and found that there are 26 languages available. Apparently, Valve doesn’t plan on including any new languages, referring users to fan-translated manuals if they want another.

8. Valve takes a cut of about 30% from all Steam game sales.

A popular line of criticism levied against the Steam business model pertains to its seemingly unfair cut of sales. Namely, the platform claims up to 30% of a game’s sales, as the financial statistics about Steam indicate.

As one can imagine, the Epic Game Store deal of a flat 12% sounds much more appealing to developers. This was a large part of why Steam took a bit of a hit back in 2019 in terms of sales revenue.

Steam Link, an app that lets you stream Steam content from your library, was a big hit with the public. After a few years, it managed to garner a massive user base, reaching 2 million downloads in 2019.

The bulk of this number came from Android users. But the Steam stats on the topic show us that the app also performed really well on iOS devices. Though released a few years later, it only took around a week for it to amass 300 thousand downloads from Apple’s App Store.

Steam Game Stats

10. U.S. players account for 14.43% of all Steam users.

Steam has users from across the globe. However, the United States demographic makes up a large chunk of the total user base. As the U.S. Steam stats on the matter demonstrate, the country is responsible for almost 15% of all Steam accounts.

11. With a maximum of almost 1,000,000 people playing it every day, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is currently the most played game on Steam.

Despite starting out as a humble 1999 mod for Half-Life, Counter-Strike became a wildly successful franchise. The series’ most recent iteration, CS:GO, now enjoys the status of the most played game on Steam.

According to the Steam statistics for games it hosts, there can be as many as a million players duking it out in CS:GO, though the average is much closer to 900,000.

12. There are over 40,000 games on Steam.

The virtual hallways of the Steam library seem to stretch out forever. But “infinite” is not how many games in Steam’s arsenal you can expect. The actual number is much more manageable, though it may as well be infinite from an individual’s perspective.

There are approximately 40,000+ games on Steam at the moment, with an average user score rating of roughly 80%. Each year, about 8,000 new titles make it to the platform.

13. Steam’s PC users have played a total of over 20 billion hours in 2019.

When you hear gamers proclaiming that video games are a lifestyle for them, they aren’t joking. PC gamers in particular pour in amazing amounts of time into video games.

How much? Here’s one way of looking at it. In 2019, PC Steam users have spent more than 20 billion hours playing the least and most popular games alike.

14. With 1,000,447 concurrent users, DOTA 2 became the most played game in 2019.

The story of DOTA 2 shares similarities to that of Counter Strike. It came about as a custom map for Warcraft 3 that slowly amassed popularity. Eventually, it spun off into its own game (and even a genre) that’s been enjoying tremendous success.

It really is impressive how far DOTA has come when you look at the broad perspective. From its humble beginnings, it turned into Steam’s most played game of 2019 in terms of concurrent users.

15. North American Steam users download games at a rate of around 1 Tbps.

Steam users in North America download games from Steam at a jaw-dropping rate, as the numbers show. As per the Steam download stats, this demographic downloads around a terabyte every second.

But as impressive as that is, North America is only the second-best in this regard. Asia takes the number-one slot with around 3.5 Tbps.

16. A mere 100 games accounted for half of Steam’s entire revenue in 2017.

It makes sense that a minority of heavy-hitter titles would be responsible for most of the financial success on Steam. The Steam game statistics confirm this: just 100 of Steam’s top games raked in half of its 2017 revenue.

Titles like PUBG and CS:GO were the most profitable games that year. Together, they earned around $720 ($600 million from the former, $120 million from the latter).

17. In 2015, Steam users made over $50 million by selling maps and hats.

In-game transactions have recently proven to be very lucrative. Here’s a glimpse into how much money there is to be made here: Steam users have apparently made more than $50 million just by selling game assets like hats and maps.

18. Indie games have earned around $5.2 billion on Steam.

The indie game movement has been gaining momentum for years now. It’s great that it has: a lot of amazing titles came from independent developers. At this point, indie games are, collectively, a financial force to be reckoned with.

The game stats Steam’s financial records include are proof of this. From the approximately 34,000 indie titles, Steam has earned an excess of $5 billion. That means an average revenue of $170,000 for every indie game on the platform.

19. On average, a game is owned by 25 accounts.

Analysis of Steam statistics has revealed that your average video game will be present on 25 Steam accounts. How much people will play them, on the other hand, is a different matter altogether. The average playtime for a game is 669.7 hours, but the outliers vary wildly.

Steam Player Stats

20. The most users Steam has had in 2020 is 24,535,923.

The year 2020 has been a rocky one for most industries. This was mostly down to the coronavirus pandemic leading to economic shutdowns. However, industries involved in indoor activities have made ends meet for the most part.

Steam user stats show us that gaming has been weathering the storm fairly well. The peak user number of more than 24.5 million people certainly attests to that. This record happened in April, and stands as an all-time high for the platform at the moment of writing.

21. Since 2004, the number of Steam users grew by 26,324%.

Steam’s overwhelming success came from a number of factors. Many point to Valve’s stellar titles such as Half Life 2 and Counter-Strike as the fuel driving its growth. Whatever the case may be, the proof of Steam’s success is easily surmised by a single percentage.

Namely, Steam stats concerning its user base show that the platform has grown to gigantic heights. In the span of 15 years or so, its user base has mushroomed to 26,3245 of its size in 2004.

22. In October 2019, Steam had around 95 million monthly active users.

The Steam user growth rate has been steady over the years, even despite growing competition. By 2019, a massive 95 million people have been logging into Steam every month. For some perspective on how large that number is, that’s almost as many people as the population of Vietnam.

23. The billionth Steam account was made on April 28th, 2019.

April 28th, 2019 saw a great milestone. On that day, Steam’s player count reached a tremendously pleasing 1 billion accounts. The account that pushed over the 1bn limit is one called AMUSEDSILENTDRAGONFLY.

24. 74.29% of Steam gamers use Nvidia hardware.

The majority of Steam gamers have a predilection for Nvidia hardware, as the data extracted from Steam account stats demonstrates. Almost three-quarters of them use Nvidia products to power their rigs.

Intel and AMD are the two other prominent manufacturers, but they’re clearly in the minority. Together, they only comprise around 25% of the share.

25. 41.81% of users have 16GB of RAM.

A look into Steam player statistics on most popular hardware uncovers that most people’s computers run on 16 gigabytes of RAM. The other most prominent capacity is 8GB, which 30.38% of surveyed Steam users have.

26. The Steam profile with the most games has around 31,738 titles.

Seldom who on Steam will only have one game in their repertoire. But even fewer have the gaming appetite as one dwight schrute.

The Steam profile stats for this account are pretty impressive. It has more than 31 thousand games and almost 400 badges. The playtime for this profile is well into the 10K’s, and has been around for 12 years since the moment of writing.

27. 89.28% of Steam users run on Windows 10 (64 bit).

Windows 10 is the latest version at the moment, so it’s natural that most people would be using it to power their computers. That’s why this OS is responsible for almost 90% of all Steam users’ functioning computers.

In case you’re interested in some more Steam PV user statistics, here are a few more. More than 95% of users have Windows as their OS. Moreover, 0.9% of people play on a Linux computer, mostly on Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS 64 bit (0.21%).

28. The average positive Steam game review is 184 characters long.

Here are some Steam statistics of less obvious value. Namely, the average positive review of a game on Steam will have 184 characters. On the other hand, negative reviews have an average of 295 characters.

This tells us that negative reviews tend to be longer. In that length, they are more likely to be constructive for developers, giving them more ideas on what they should change about their games.

29. The account with the longest playtime on Steam currently has over 1,700,000 hours of playtime.

Steam user statistics host a very busy gamer indeed. This person goes by the handle Tuong Do, and they’ve managed to rack up 1,756,632 (at the moment of writing) hours of gameplay in the span of 8 years.

Now, that roughly translates into 1940 years, so there’s clearly something strange going on. Most likely, this person tends to have multiple games running at the same time, multiplying the hour count.

30. 2.30% of Steam users play in 4K.

In general, the 4K trend in gaming isn’t exactly overwhelming right now. There should be good growth in the near future, but, for now, a tiny minority makes use of 4K monitors. Steam usage stats for such hardware show that only 2.3% of people utilize these kinds of resolutions.

Conclusion

From the looks of it, Steam is hardly running out of steam. It is truly a massive platform that millions of gamers call their own. It’s pretty difficult to imagine a gaming world without Steam, to be honest.

These Steam statistics shine a light on the distributor’s importance. They’re both intriguing to the casual reader and useful for developers looking to navigate Steam’s waters. Whatever your needs are, you’ve hopefully left this list with something valuable.