More game hours and user spending — Steam reported for 2021

Valve has summed up the results of 2021 for its digital Steam store. In many ways, it was more successful than the previous year. For example, the platform has increased the number of active users, and those, in turn, have spent more money on games.

Platform

• Valve has not disclosed Steam’s annual revenue. She only noted that users spent 27% more on games than in 2020.
• The time that Steam users spent in games also increased — by 21% to 38 billion hours.
• On average, 2.6 million new customers came to Steam every month (the same number came in 2020).
• In just a year, 31.2 million new customers appeared on the platform.
• The number of active users per month is 132 million. This is 12 million more compared to the previous year.
• The number of active users per day is 69 million.

Games

• The number of VR game users increased by 11%, and the amount of hours they played increased by 22%. More than a third of the headsets sold were on Oculus Quest 2.
• The Steam audience that uses controllers has continued to grow. If in 2020 46.6 million people played at least once with the help of controllers, then in 2021 — 48 million. Controllers were used in about 10% of gaming sessions every day.
• The Remote Play feature appeared on Steam in 2019, but last year the company upgraded it by adding joint gaming sessions. By the end of 2021, 34% of all Remote Play sessions were on Remote Play Together.
• During the year, projects developed by studios from 35 countries were able to enter the monthly charts of Steam’s bestselling novelties. More than a third of the new products were made by developers who first released their games in the Valve store.
• Games from Chinese developers have grown by 300% outside of China (Valve did not specify whether we are talking about the audience of these games or their box office).
• Last year, Steam users received a total of 32.9 exabytes of content — 30% more than in 2020.

Marketing

• Electronic gift cards appeared on Steam in 2017, however, according to the company, they “really shot” only last year. In 2021, users gave each other 2.6 million such certificates. The cost of cards in dollars at the same time increased by 43% compared to 2020.
• In 2021, festivals with games were successfully held on the platform. On average, users were 22 times more likely to add titles to the vishlist that participated there.
• The Steam summer sale aroused considerable user interest — developer revenue jumped by 13% compared to 2020. And the winter sale turned out to be the largest in the history of the digital store. During it, 2.3 million people bought the game on Steam for the first time.
• At the beginning of the year, Valve added a tool for UTM analytics to Steam, with which developers were able to evaluate traffic. In 2021, the company counted more than 400 million page visits of over 44 thousand games via external links with UTM tags.