Just over a week into 2024, Steam, the world's largest online game sales platform, has set a new record. While they don't have the same extravagant "Higa Sixteen" event as Epic, Steam reached a peak of 33675229 online users last night.
SteamDB was the first to sync the news, and at the time, CS:GO and Dota 2 were the two most popular games. The 24-hour player count peaked at 1.2 million and 730,000, respectively, with the remaining three games in the top five being PUBG, Apex Legends, and Baldur's Gate 3.
Most of the titles with the most online users on Steam on the top 10 list are old games, but there are also new titles like Baldur's Gate 3. Admittedly, two V Club games, CS:GO and Dota 2, still hold up half of Steam, but the launch of new games is the key to ensuring the vitality of the platform.
Throughout 2023, the total number of games released on Steam is 14,532, which is also history. It's important to note that this number is more than the total number of games released in the first ten years of operation on Steam. Since 2023, Steam has released 39 new games every day, but most of them have not been able to catch fire.
According to market research firm vginsights, the latest 2023 PC Steam Games Market Report shows: Steam game sales reached $9 billion last year, and the total circulation of games was 590 million copies. In the sales data, the top 10 games account for 61% of the sales share.
This means that in addition to the top 10 games, the remaining 14,522 games released in 2023 account for only 39% of the share. It's also the largest disparity between newly released games since 2016. If you expand the range to the top 100, this figure becomes 91%. In other words, it's a battlefield where the victor takes everything.
September 12, 2023, is the 20th anniversary of Steam's launch. From the original "CS:GO" launcher to the current platform with more than 100 million monthly active users that players around the world can't live without, V Society has put in a lot of effort.
Many game manufacturers have tried to launch their own game platforms, but they have not become mainstream due to problems such as network connection, limited number of games, and client experience. Although there are still not many players using Epic, it is still the most successful gaming platform in the market outside of Steam. Of course, Epic needs to do better in the future if it wants to reach the heights of Steam.
So how many games have you bought on Steam in the past year, and which one has you spent the most time playing?