Valve has released statistics about its platform Steam, and it looks to have had huge growth in 2021.
Valve definitely had a good year, with statistics like 132million monthly active players, 69million daily active players, and a peak concurrent player count of 27.4million. But one of the more fascinating stats in among the year-end results, is the fact that there was 27 per cent more spending than in 2020, with 31.2million new purchasers.
The goals coming into 2021 were clear, and Valve says it wanted to make it easy for PC games to get onto Steam with plenty of control for the developer, while trying to maintain Steam as the “best place for customers to own and play the game.”
The global pandemic had a large impact on both the games that were delayed and released, but also on the amount of people who spent time playing games. Valve thus compares statistics from last year to 2020, saying: “Steam saw 2.6million first-time purchasers each month of 2021, roughly the same rate of new purchaser growth we saw in 2020 as the global pandemic unfolded.”
Apparently digital gift cards were very popular in 2021 as well. First introduced in 2017, there were more than 2.6million digital gift cards sent in 2021, with the overall value of them up 43 per cent compared to 2020.
